Commissioned by Integra, this work is the first of the cycle Breathes/Eats/Sleeps, a collection of audiovisual compositions which examines the place of the body in our world; a body that has become socially constrained by its rituals, prerequisite forms and norms. Our Western and homogeneous society is transfixed by the cult of a perfect healthy body, without illness or porosity. It wants to impose a ‘natural’ lifestyle, but it actually stifles it by its own contradictions and censorships.
This project, created with the artist David Coste is divided into two main sections ; the first focuses upon the breathing itself, the movement of the stomach becoming the object of an unrelenting machine taking the musical material towards an incessant pulsation. The second part is a trance-dance. We filmed the dancers after suggesting to them the following imaginary scenario:
“I am in a night-club; I start to dance convinced that I am in a group and, as the music invades the space, I become aware of my extreme loneliness”. From this ‘constrained narrative’ each dancer gave us his or her version: sometimes an explosive reaction and sometimes, conversely, an intimate withdrawn submersion.
At the end, the bodies are merged into the video, creating a purified, empty white space where they allow themselves to be carried along by the lengthy repetitive crescendo.
