BODY AS IMAGE
Rodion

Video installation / performance

PARTICIPANTS:
Author: Rodion
Producer: Tijana Gojić
Construction of electric baton: Vjekoslav Fabijanić
Costume design: Katarina Fišter
Year of realization: 2007.

DESCRIPTION / SYNOPSIS:

I am in the centre of a (gallery) space. Vertical position. Continuing the line of the body, my arms are stretched above the head, tied to wrists and tied to the ceiling. Legs are close to each other with tied ankles.

Duration: 45 minutes a day, during 1 to 3 days.

Visitors come inside one by one.

There is a pedestal in front of me, with a modified electric baton on it. Visitor has to take the baton and touch me with it, inflict a mild electric shock. Each electric shock produces image, each touch with electric baton projects a video image onto my body. Contents and sizes of images are various. Images can be twodimensional and threedimensional. Their duration is infinite. With every next electric shock visitor produces a new image. Longer contact between the baton and the body doesn't mean longer duration of the image but increased possibility of damage of the body.

Body As Image is a title that represents the video installation almost literally. It is about the relation between body and image, body as image and image as body. In a society and time that we live in, a certain transformation of body has been present a long since (from streets, squares and waiting rooms through new technologies, new diseases, medical, juridical, artistic and other discourses, to a wide variety of media, etc.). Apart from the fact that it understands a radical metamorphosis of body, it also includes a possibility of manipulating that same body. Manipulation of body by image as manipulation of image by image. Body is seen and experienced as debris of its previous form, fragmentary, disintegrated, unmaterial. All that makes it liable to observation, scrutiny and inspection through software programs, pixels, electric impulses and digital units. It has become image. On the other hand, image has also gain almost all characteristics of body: movement and mobility, multidimensionality, size, growth, reproduction, vulnerability, extension – contraction...

Constant transformation of body is seen as its possibility for self-confirmation. As much as it is disembodied, mutilated, recycled, digitalized, immaterialized, etc, body never loses its essence that makes it recognizable. Because, it is impossible to record and reproduce, amplify and digitalize our breath, taste of skin, smell, etc. In spite of all changes and transformations, body in many situations reacts faster than consciousness, registers and reacts faster than „me“. In spite of all recycling, montage and digitalizing, body remains integral. „Body without organs“ is still body. Project „Body As Image“ signifies something of the presumption that the human body is matter and territory on which different praxis and discourses exercise their novelties, but that body, losing some of its characteristics, keeps its essence which makes it „body“.

Having my arms and legs tied and hanging from the ceiling, I am trying, through visual and mimetic order, to reduce body to characteristics of image. I am trying to take away its congenital characteristics of reacting, contracting, of reflex actions. Trying to reduce it to the surfice which threedimensionality easily loses one dimension. There appears a process of equalizing body and image. Adding and subtracting which function two-ways and (ir)reversibly. It is relation that understands reciprocity of content and representation. At the same time, it is relation that can produce a tension, uneasiness and nausea (that's why I'm hung on a ceiling: a scene that reminds us of torturing methods; torturing body by image and torturing image by body). A question arises: how (un)painfull is the transformation of body? How much can body comprehend disappearance of its own form and gaining a new one? Is it ready and how ready is it for the transformation to last? How much until (un)painfully becoming image? On the other hand, how simple and how (un)painfully can image transform, lose and create itself. How many changes its body can take and bare?

The content of images that are being projected onto the body with each discharge of electric baton, is various. Images speak of the body itself, about its past, wounds, encounters, injuries, peoples, diseases, movements... While losing itself and transforming, body is remembering and, at the same time observing its own disappearance into a new I. Just while becoming image by image, body is being gushed by images of the old I.

This project is not only questioning the relation between body and image, nor only reexamining body per se, but body is being considered as a possibility of its own affirmation. Simultaneously with losing itself, body is constructing itself. In that lies its strength and (r)evolution, its drama and its potential. Body as a possibility of self-abolishment – body as a realization of self-confirmation.

Rodion

Rodion. Born in 1980 in Dubrovnik, Croatia. Has been doing performance and visual arts since 2000. godine. Lives in Zagreb. As a co-founder and member of Antitheatre Laboratory he created and performed in the following performances: Transmission of Presented S.; Yet-no-communication; Axis of Civilization and/or Ejaculation of mytho-Object. Some of his solo performances, installations and videos include: Figure of Abstraction for Piano and Violin; Shortenings; To Be Here; Diagnosis: Time; Lips; Body of Eye_0; Mother Cleaning Heads; Awakeness; when things are touched with eyes shut, they seem bigger then they are, and so forth. Premiere of the performance-installation Body As Image took place in the Gallery 'Otok' in Dubrovnik in 2007.