Movement
5
provocation
In her Movement 4, Jenny traced herself resting, lying down, and filled around her outline with words
response
Binda
“When a body desires stillness and desire lines are drawn, the red tape transforms into red thread vitality.”
When Jenny arrived at the Haymarket Cafe with rolls of paper under her arm and unrolled them across the table and beyond, and there were these amazing outlines of her actual body surrounded by words that expressed the need for rest and what that meant for her, I was — Pinged! My jaw dropped open. I found them to be so visually exciting. Listening to her talk about it, very quickly I started wondering about three-dimensionalizing the drawings in real body time, so to speak. I took them home, I hung them on the wall, I read every single word she’d written, I made notes.
I wanted to speak to what felt like it needed to be expressed: What’s happening in the dormancy? Lots. Lots happening on the inside, lots happening in the underground, lots happening in the organs. I decided to suspend a cutout of Jenny’s body so that we could see the inside and outside, the top and the underneath. And the threads up to Heaven, so to speak, also connect through us to the Earth. They also connect from the outside of us to the inside of us. And so I made room in my studio and decided to see if it would work.
Some years back, I had made some organs out of clay. At the time, I didn’t know why I had made them; in fact, I had been trying to figure that out for a while. This project, I discovered, is where they belong: the inside of our body made visible, grounded to the Earth, fully intertwined with the red threads of our aliveness. When Jenny delivered the drawings in a scroll, she had them tied together with strips of cloth she had “rended” for another event called (Kyra’s day of the dead meal). She had invited folks to write messages to loved ones lost known or unknown on these rended strips of cloth and pin them to the wall. It felt correct to entwine those with the red threads that spiraled down and wrapped around the organs. After all, our organs are connected to our nervous systems, which are informed by our histories and our ancestor’s stories. They are a part of our felt sense of aliveness and relationship to self and other.
Jenny’s use of red tape to keep the pages together made me think about the red thread of aliveness. It felt to me as if her process of taking permission to rest — of literally lying down on the ground and using her body as her response — was like interrupting the red tape and inviting the red thread of aliveness to exist instead. That transformation was happening. I wanted to show it happening. I also realized that in cutting through the red tape, she had accessed her desire lines. A desire line is the name given to paths people take that were not expected in the design of public spaces. Thus, on Jenny’s body floating in space I wrote: “When a body desires stillness and desire lines are drawn, the red tape transforms into red thread vitality.” I also felt moved to make a recording of this and other reflections on this movement against a back drop of Solu Stream sounds. (link below)
