Sara Ahmed’s idea of orientation: what we reach for shapes what we know. What touches first becomes the condition for how we proceed. This is a surface practice—unfolded slowly, changed by contact, held only until we no longer need to.
Through his seemingly insignificant walks, Francis Alÿs not only reimagines the city, he also creates narratives, spreads rumors, maps the social fabric of the place through actions that are sometimes short sometimes carried out over long distances or many hours, by turns dragging, pushing or carrying an accessory that stands in for a clue to reading the fable spun by the body in motion.
the body is not just a passive object but an active medium through which we experience and engage with the world. -Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty
7 days ago
How far can I reach? I'm in a car traveling the folds of the southwest region of the country and the road is steadying out and becoming flat and giving off an energy like a vortex leading into the horizon line. I'm getting closer to the coast, and realize how much I hate arriving at a destination. Transition is always a relief. Destination means death to me. If I could figure out a way to remain forever in transition in the disconnected and unfamiliar I could remain in a state of perpetual freedom. It's the preferable sensation of arriving at a movie fifteen minutes late and departing twenty minutes later then retrieving an echo of real life as opposed to a tarped sensation.
- David Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration (Chapter 3)
Our bodies have a form of knowledge that is different from our cognitive brains. The knowledge is typically experienced as a felt sense of constriction or expansion, pain or ease, energy or numbness. Often this knowledge is stored in our bodies as wordless stories about what is safe and what is dangerous. The body is where we fear, hope, and react; where we constrict and release; and where we reflexively fight, flee, or freeze. If we are to upend the status quo of white-body supremacy, we must begin with our bodies.
