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Arts & Communication

PERSPECTIVE ARTICLE
Un medio, el cuerpo. Un miedo, el cuerpo

Carolina Muñoz Awad*

1 Department of Fine Arts, Parsons School of Design, The Newschool, New York, USA
2 Architecture School, Faculty of Architecture, Design and Urban Studies, Pontificia Universidad
Católica de Chile, Santiago, Chile

Abstract

I needed to feel held. Physically, by the inanimate, during a pandemic that was
transmitted by touch. Doing nothing, while performing, became the subject of my
studies. How do I perform with a body that does not know how it uses space, how
much it measures, and how much it feels? Counting, keeping scores, and pushing to
the limit of uncomfortability, became my way of establishing the timelines. Seventeen
lemons, my own body weight, and 42 cm, are some of the objective parameters I
found while enacting absurdity, improvisation, and movement through my human
body. The resourcing of the works is part of the pieces themselves, leaving a trace of
actions involved, blurring the boundary between daily life and the art I was creating.
Yvonne Rainer, Herman Hertzberger, Gilles Deleuze, Rosalind Krauss, and Ernesto
Pujol, among others, enter the conversation within my experimentations, as critical
references, and guiding thoughts for the questions I have. The performative actions
I produced are part of an embodied investigation that, through myself, encounters
displacement, estrangement, irreversible loss, and grief, within a 2-year time frame.

Keywords: Performance; Absurd; Inventory; Grid; Body; Human
*Corresponding author:
Carolina Muñoz Awad
(carolina.munoz.awad@gmail.com)
Citation: Awad CM, 2023, Un
medio, el cuerpo. Un miedo, el 1. Being in place
cuerpo. Arts & Communication,
1(2): 1137. The purpose of this article is to portray the research done by the author, in which she
https://doi.org/10.36922/ac.1137 utilizes her own human body as the subject in question, not only in the physical realm of
movement, but also in the realms of thought and writing. The following sections unfold
Received: June 26, 2023
the performative actions accompanied by the language that took the artist through lived
Accepted: August 21, 2023 experiences. Some of the references are imposed by the environment, while others come
Published Online: September 20, from memory, and the (un)conscious conditionings in the author’s body’s life till now.
2023
2. How do you move when there is nothing left to hold?
Copyright: © 2023 Author(s).
This is an Open Access article It is not that there are no things left, but what does “holding” mean at all? Referring to
distributed under the terms of the
Creative Commons Attribution bodies, human bodies — during a highly contagious pandemic — “holding” was put into
License, permitting distribution, question even more. I laid overcooked rice over my body, compost (processed and raw),
and reproduction in any medium, cream cheese, construction tape, paper bags, artist tape in the form of a grid, plaster
provided the original work is
properly cited. bands, fabric, and sand, as if I wanted something to make me feel held, contained. I could
not hold other human bodies for a while, and others could not hold me either, not even
Publisher’s Note: AccScience
Publishing remains neutral with my dog, who was thousands of miles away in Chile. Not human, but human enough.
regard to jurisdictional claims in
published maps and institutional Alluding to Yvonne Rainer’s The Concept of Dust, or How do you look when there’s nothing
[1]
affiliations. left to move? (live performance at MoMA, New York, June 13, 2015) , absurdity invaded
Volume 1 Issue 2 (2023) 1 https://doi.org/10.36922/ac.1137