PUBLIC BODY

Research project on body and public space

By Valeria Primost

Even in the most intimate actions of our bodies, the public realm is present.

Because we all know what those actions are about and because in terms like public health and family planning the activities of sex and defecation are included, we know that that intimacy or privacy is relative.

Public and private are terms invented to delineate interests within a particular system, they are cultural concepts that don’t apply to every human culture.

Public Body is a research on the way public space, as a collection of cultural, political and commercial values, conditions our bodies. This going so far as for the bodies to become public space themselves: a place where public interests meet.

My dance is one more possible action of my own public body. To transform spaces of transition in spaces to inhabit, is a way of making visible the options they have to offer and of revealing patterns of behavior and created relations.

During my residency at AIAV, I have applied this ideas and practice to three public spaces I encountered: a place in the city, a place in the mountain and a place within one building.

Through the difference of these three places, I enter a new layer of my concern for the body as public space, now not anymore limited to its relation to urban public spaces. I am starting to look at nature as a public space, in terms of how it´s behavior can affect our health, the health of citizens and therefore the public health. Whether we live in the city or in the country side we are obliged to hold an ID card which proof our condition of civilized legal people, so by bringing our bodies to nature, we bring with us: public space, to the point that nature becomes: urban.

What I find out I am trying to do with this process is to shorten the distances and broaden our awareness of how fictive it is to think urbanity as detached from the rural or natural, especially today when Earth quakes and Tsunamis come to remind us, that we are part of a geological system and we must accept that if we want to survive and be consequent to our actual possibilities.

By turning terms around I bring back the priority to what actually rules: the nature of things. Assuming there is no private space, there is no private body, there is no nature that has not been made public, we have no other chance than to work for what we need in the realm of the public.

 VP.