It is a room where four people gather to be a body. Unconditionally, without knowing what the practice of being a body entails in its ever evolving entirety. They enter to land within themselves (where were they before?), to perceive their inner spaces. They find themselves in a pressure-free environment where the body, with a tendency to become excessively condensed and accelerated, can find the organicity of its flow. To body is to be in experience. Here, they are guided by the dynamic process, desires and needs of their living matter, and their individual embodiments act as evolving and changing scores of the now. To body is to create and hold space. Experiencing creates a field that fills the seemingly empty room with a felt enmindedness, which can be entered into and joined with.
You are invited within.
The space is held by dance artists Joanna Kalm, Laura Kvelstein, Nele Suisalu and Tatjana Romanova. They met from fall of 2022 until September 2024, sporadically and periodically intensively. Bodyplace is a somatic practice and/or a durational performance and/or a generator of embodied reflexivity and conversation, which emerged out of a collective studio-based meetings – of deep hanging out with our bodies and each other.
What is necessary for having an experience? Experience of the aspects of yourself which might be more in the unconscious, more subtle and tender in their presence, lying under and above the tonality of everyday embodiment, humaning?
It might be that the first requirement is space and time. '
Unless you are after experiences that puncture you with strength and speed. Such experiences simply grab hold of your bodily space and time.
There are many ways to have experiences, many ways to be in experience.
What is your habitual experiential modality of being? Which experiential consciousness1 do you embody and act from most often? Would you like your experience of yourself, others and the world to diversify?
Well, then make/take/allow/open up space and give it time — give it an opportunity, and opening, to come forth.
To be honest, we do not say too much when you enter. Bodyplace is a spherical space: you enter, you are already in it, with your questions and doubts.
We see you, acknowledge your entrance and presence with our bodies; usually, but not always, one of us would afford a verbal 'hello' or locking of eyes, to confirm your arrival.
We offer you a papersheet with guiding bodily pathways upon entrance. The papers are at the door. We hope this makes your landing easier, but there is also a chance you passed it by.
That's okay: this room is about figuring out how we are bodying and in that sense it is a lot about personal responsibility and accountability. We are not here to tell you how to be a body, how to human. Rather, it is a space for allowing our priorly composed embodiments to unravel and re-configure. We are in processes of undoing and becoming. Observing and questioning our own enminded materialisations.
Spatiomaterial cues communicating the etiquette of the room.
In translation, loosely:
The business of carpets, blankets, pillows, covers, and stools.
The room, we came to realise through practice, acted like a cellular membrane. It contained us without separating us.
The gallery space has big windows, which allowed there to be information flow (light, sound, people looking, entering, exiting) between the room and surrounding environment.
As a result, the room could maintain its own integrity, similarly to cells in the body, which are in intra-active relations with other agents, but nevertheless have agency to decide and modulate what and how much passes through and streers the contained mileiu.
It is acknowledged in cellular biology that it is the emergence of the cellular membrane that makes an organism possible, providing it integrity and a sense of unification. Without the membrane, we would be lost to the spatial dynamics and differentiation would become impossible.
Thus, being a membranous being and inhabiting membranous spaces entails simultaneously two modus of existing: experiencing relative containement and existing in relations.
