With minimal intervention, the spaces we dwell in every day reveal completely new spatial relationships, new “terrains” that generate new ways of understanding and movement. Using masking tape or cord, we will explore the three-dimensional nature of our space and designate different directions and planes within it.

Quotations from participants:

„A very different experiences of the space in which we spend most of our time.“

“Tying was interesting to me, how much I had to focus on tying straps to make everything work, and the more I was tying the more I was constraining the space for myself. The more one ties the more they constrain, themselves, their space for movement.“

“The more flexible you are, the better. Like in life. You can dance, or you can tear yourself and everything around you. And when you’re flexible, then it’s a dance, then you dance.”

“It was an interesting experience when I lay under the strips, a strong experiential feeling of protection…and there was no need for an upgrade, just one sign, one or two lines, already form the space, and how quickly space defines the state.“

“Discovering trajectories, both from space and from body.”

“Everything is connected, the space around us and becoming aware of this space by using these strips.“

“I liked it a lot, it was fun, exploring the body and movement and space. I enjoyed rolling around the floor, I was ashamed and I turned off the camera…I enjoyed the strips, I felt the need to put a scarf, strip, ball, I really enjoyed it.“

photo: Andreja Hotko Pavić

Terrains

Jasmina Fučkan

“Scale  is connected with our whole life – perhaps it is even our whole intuitive capacity to feel it.”[1]
Barbara Hepworth

What is the body I live in? How do I inhabit it? How does it inhabit my room? How many terrains do I inhabit?

The inspiration for the transformation of the everyday came from Kurt Schwitters’s Merzbau, site-specific installations, and Oskar Schlemmer’s theatrical sketches in which Marina finds incentives close to her sensibility. With the basic nature of the materials used, her own body, living space and the method of open experiment, she builds on the implications that the Arte Povera movement had on 20th-century art.

Marina uses the creative experience resulting from creating a unique visual and performative site-specific work Place in 2017 (Galerija Događanja, Zagreb) and transfers it into the homes of the participants of the encounter with the aim to achieve awareness and defamiliarization of everyday routes of routine movement through seemingly familiar, but not fully used terrains of the rooms we live in.

Zrinka guides the participants through the process of becoming aware of the ways by which the body takes its own three-dimensional space within the space of the room, introducing the notion of kinesphere into the process – the scale of personal space in which the body exists.

We experience our environment through our body and using our senses we draw a personal polygraph curve of movement through the states of comfort and discomfort, by which the psyche detects the scales of personal vitality. Exploring the kinesphere also implies the refreshment of the senses, immersion in the experience of freedom, in different intensities of protection or exposure to exterior space. Kinesphere does not exist without movement. We create space through movement and only then can we explore it. One always carries the kinesphere with them through space.

Many of Schlemmer’s theatrical sketches show the invisible network of planimetric and stereometric relationships that structure the laws of cubical space that, in principle, corresponds to the system of the human body. The room faceted into smaller segments using simple linear markings, spatial forces connecting opposite directions, differs from the one we see every day because compared to the compact three-dimensionality of the body it dissolves in an unexpected fragmentation of spatial plans. The overlapping bundles of hollow surfaces create a terrain that provides opportunities to explore new choreographic scores in finding familiar places, as well as the ones we have not yet visited in the rooms in which we live every day.

[1] Barbara Hepworth (1903 – 1975) “Sculpture”, in: Harrison, S., Wood, P. Art in Theory 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, Blackwell Publishing, 2005, p. 394.