Podcast

Let me first tell you a story. Recently, on a visit to my parents, I told my mother that I wanted to get my file back from Dr. A. She answered that she was afraid that it would be painful for me to read what he had written about me back then.
Dr. A. is the pediatrician who tactlessly announced to my parents that I, their daughter, was disabled and was going to vegetate in a bed all my life. I don’t know why I wanted to get my file back. Maybe I did not want to leave an important part of my life in the hands of this ‘dear’ doctor. Maybe I wanted to escape once and for all from his stranglehold, by seeing whatever he could have written about me and my body. I knew the words that I’d see in my file were not going to be painful to read. My present life would protect me from the word of the past. My parents were not protected and, as such, the doctor’s words frightened them. But when you knew the end of the story, the beginning would seem less frightening. Perhaps.
Facing my parents, Dr. A. spoke about my body, a body that he believed to understand through a medical vocabulary and scientific typologies. He condemned my existence at the very moment it began. His dangerous words seemed to make the whole progression of my life synonymous with mobility: “no improvement is possible; no change is think-able.” “This child shall never learn syntax and language,” he said. “This child shall never walk,” he said. “This child shall never draw a circle,” he said. When did I learn to read and write, walk, and draw a circle, he said “This child is developing very abnormally.”
His words, like all medical discourse, were dangerous because they claim to be authoritative, capable of defining a body, an existence, a child’s future. The medical discourse draws a boundary between normal bodies and pathological bodies. It sets up a hierarchy between the bodies that matter and all the others. It also reinforces a symbolic system of social order weighing over bodies that do not tally with the norm. Bodies are marked, categorized.

Mind and body are strictly connected in each and every individual, as they obviously pertain to dimensions characterized by intersections, territorial invasions, and communications. The mind can perceive, it can experience through the body, it can even force the body into certain directions, influencing its natural development. Yet, as connected as they are, the mind seems to indiscriminately prevail over the body, because of a kind of supremacy that many would allegedly recognize in it. Nevertheless, it could not be any more surprising to discover that the body can deeply influence the mind as well, inhibiting or propelling its energy and its polarity. Both the mind and the body can be – in alternate ways – catalysts; both can act as magnets that induce, or direct, behaviours in a delicate and ever changing balance between eye and limb. This connection has reflections on a larger scale, as we move from the individual to the social dimension and try to see the regulators of human interactions. How much do political and religious directives determine social phenomenon, in both their physical and mental consequences and expressions? In which proportion is mass media (a mental construction) influencing our physical desires (subliminally) and self-opinion (trying to comply to the dictate of stereotypes)? These are just few of the many questions we could ask about the determination of general, social behavioural patterns induced over the collective bodies and minds, or the 'public body'. When we think of the preponderance of the body over the mind we do, perhaps naively and with misconceptions, think of a sort of animalism – a form of resistance embraced by the most spontaneous, unrefined, rebellious aspects of human personalities. Performance is often using the body to its extreme potential, tying it or liberating it, thus marking a point against fixed, over-structured, or judgemental positions.Through the use of the body we tend to create a break in a continuum by physically intervening in the 'reality'. At the same time we mostly invite the audience (both the one attending the performance and the one who will come to know it through the documentation of the event – a critical and often carefully set aspect of the performative action) to make contact, to have a 'tactile' experience where the limits of the bodies tend to fade and to encourage an encounter. The spectator is asked to 'attend' or, in other words, a tension is to be created in order to pass the message. Space and time become conspicuous elements, and their variation determines a variation in the result of the single event. The response by the audience can become an essential component of the performance, always to a certain extension and within certain limits since the artistic intervention mostly has a status by itself, as a manifestation.