Bodies of water

Performance

Solar Galeria de Arte Cinemática

19 Set (Sáb) | 18:00 

Entrada livre | Performance realizada no âmbito da exposição Raw Rhythms, de Cecilia Bengolea
 
This performance begins with a simple question: where does a body end and a landscape begin?
Rather than occupying space, the performer enters into a field of exchanges. Movement becomes a way of dissolving the distinction between figure and back, allowing the body to oscillate between visibility and disappearance, individuality and atmosphere. Camouflage is not understood as imitation but as a state of permeability, in which the body composes itself with light, texture, vegetation, architecture, wind, and sound.
The work departs from the idea of identity as a stable human condition. Instead, it proposes an expansive, protean body that exceeds itself through rhythm. The performer becomes less a singular figure than a temporary constellation of movements, continually reshaped by the environment it inhabits. Presence emerges through relation rather than autonomy.
As Astrida Neimanis writes, "our bodies are bodies of water." This proposition extends beyond the literal. It suggests that we are constituted by flows, exchanges, and continuous circulation rather than by fixed borders. The performance embraces this fluid ontology, imagining the body as a porous ecology whose contours are constantly negotiated.
What emerges is neither a character nor a representation, but an organism in resonance with its surroundings. The choreography unfolds through attunement rather than mastery, proposing a more-than-human embodiment in which rhythm replaces identity, transformation replaces permanence, and relation becomes the primary form of existence.
To become camouflaged is not to disappear. It is to become irreducible to the limits of one's own body—to inhabit a mode of being that is collective, mutable, and continuously in the making.
As Donna Haraway reminds us, "we become-with each other or not at all." This notion of becoming-with is central to the performance. Identity is understood not as an autonomous condition but as a process of composition with the living world. Camouflage is therefore neither mimicry nor disappearance; it is an act of attunement. Through movement, the body enters into correspondence with its surroundings until the distinction between subject and environment becomes porous.
The work proposes a choreography of permeability, where rhythm replaces identity and relation replaces hierarchy. The body expands beyond itself, becoming less an individual than a constellation of encounters- mutable, relational, and always in the making.
– Cecilia Bengolea