Geometria sobre o conforto/en

Geometria sobre o conforto

Felipe Bittencourt

The drawing on the floor delineates the space for a body. Like the marks left by crime scene investigators at a crime scene, it circumscribes the area of ​​a body by falling. The form, however, is not that of a body organically divided into its principal members, but a geometric abstraction of that division, a quadrangular subdivision of the areas respectively struck by its extremities at the moment of a fall.

Contrasting with the artist's body, which frantically thrusts itself against the drawing on the floor, this scheme takes on an ironic and tragic aspect: it rationalizes the presence of the body from the expectation of its flight and fall, determining not simply the location of this action, but above all, how it should be. The five squares circumscribed by the larger rectangle do not demarcate only the landing place of the head, arms, and feet, but prior to this they make such points imperative to the cyclic maneuver undertaken by the perfomer: they compel him to stretch his limbs so as not to offer resistance to meet the ground.

The tension here between rationality and body is clear: we do not know exactly whether it is, on the one hand, the self-flagellant obstinacy of the body that shapes the sadistic geometry of the ground, or if, on the other hand, it is precisely this that inflicts the subject to his masochistic condition. However, in one way or another, the general reckoning is the same: the inexorable failure of a flight on which it is embedded, from the outset, the violence and brutality of fall and failure.

See also

Do It Yourself: Freedom Territory, 1968, por Antonio Dias