sound is what remains

Format: Sound action for dance and movement detection (wii motion)
Premiere: 26th june 2010. Bitef Teatar, Belgrad
Duration: 10 min.


(rehearsal video)

The body is what remains, using movement to evoke its dramas, history, memories, voices, events… Sound is what remains.

Outgoing/inspiration text:

Body Is What Remains
by Gorcin Stojanovic

– Political Body –

“Which part of essence remains visible when all the social dreams disappear, once a man realizes that ‘possibility to believe… is not existent for him anymore’? Body. That is the only ecce homo, the obvious, the pathetic and the concrete. “ (Milan Kundera, “Une rencontre”, 2009)

Body is the last resort: after everything else, after every discourse, every chant and every thought – body is what remains?

The body of the nineties on the Balkans, in Serbia, in the country of isolation, of solitude, of quiet or open repression, surrounded by war, the body racked with suppressed guilt, the body which feels what consciousness cannot grasp, that very body is halved in three situations:

1) body mangled and shredded in war,
2) imprisoned body, and
3) body of dance oblivion.

1) Body mangled and shredded in a war is the body deprived of its limbs, the disembodied body of a war politics.
2) Body imprisoned in a concentration camp: the body at deceptive rest. During the nineties, the camps in the Balkans were not intended for compulsory work or systematised organisation. They stand for random tortures, rapes, murders. It is the very residing in hell that suffices, the residing deprived of a cruel sense of any kind of production. There, the body is within an imposed space, left to the effects of time, the lethal time, time that rapes the soul and the body.
3) A Belgrade graffiti at the beginning of the nineties: “The importance of rave in the country under sanctions.” The body which dances in spasmodic motion to the techno beat, the body at two hundred beats-per-minute, the urban body in stroboscopic oblivion of the reality, the body of illusory freedom. This body is both liberated and curbed within the isolated space of simulacrum.

Out of these three bodies, only the body in a war is not a paradoxical one. The other two, the body at a deceptive liberty of dancing to techno in a repressive surrounding, as well as the body in confinement, abandoned to meaningless existence in time and space – both of those are paradoxical as the cause and the consequence are swapped over. The body of freedom and the body of non-freedom, both are subjected to an experiment. The body of a suppressed wish.

Bacon (ian) body and Hockney (ian) body

Bacon via Kundera: “(…) that is certain, we are flesh, we are potential skeletons. Whenever I go to the butcher’s I am surprised not to see myself there where the animals are.” The sequel, Kundera on Bacon: “That is neither pessimism nor despair but a mere evidence. That evidence, though, is usually hidden due to our belonging to a social circle which blinds us by its dreams, incentives, plans, illusions, struggles, reasons, religions, ideologies, passions. And then, eventually, the curtain is down, leaving us lonely with our bodies and to its mercy (…).” (M.Kundera, “Un rencontre”, 2009.)

The body of the XXI c. – it is the body rising from the Balkan spasm of the nineties. The body in transition, the healthy body well-fed by a proud consumer of material goods, the body replenished with desire, the body of awaken passions: an erecting body. At the same time, it is the body which is learning about the world, the body which is no longer a part of social experiment which it was subjected to without its consent. The erect body bends again, this time, however, under the burden of reality – the body with the burning desires which are not suppressed anymore but which cannot be satisfied. The body of misery, a miserable body, the misery of a body. Body as a product, body in transition, body in exchange, in a figurative and in a literal exchange. Selling the body, giving it over, stealing it: the body of reality shows, the body of glamour, body of a mannequin. Soulless body. Mens sana in corpore sano? No. A healthy body without spirit, a clean, firm, smooth, hairless body, a body without fluids, a rubber body without blood, urine, or sweat, without excrements, without content. Body as the only filling of a body: the end of corporal discourse – the signified and the signifier merged in the eternal nothingness of the screen and of the net, of the superreality.

Body is no longer an ultimate instance.
Body in disappearance.
Post-ideological body.
Post-ideas body.
Post-body body.
Non-body.
No-body.
Nobody.