(Un)knowing Bodies – Four artistic proposals by Teresa Borasino, AZ OOR, Serena Lee, and Kristiina Koskentola at Casco
Sensing the Ways: On Touch, Story, Movement, and Song – the Casco spring program – aims to question the established ways of knowing based on rational and reductionist ways of thinking. Four installations from four different artists propose a ‘search for other ways to know, alongside embracing forms of not-knowing,’ as stated in the brochure’s introduction. Savvas Gerolemides visits the exhibition where bodily knowledge takes the lead.
Climbing up the stairs to the exhibition floor, a familiar yet foreign smell greets my nose. Before I discover where the smell is coming from, a voice pulls me to the first room on my left. It’s the voice of the narrator from Teresa Borasino’s video Glacial Resurgence (2023-present). The film observes the melting of Quelccaya, the greatest tropical glacier in the Southern Andes of Peru. As if the rapid melting wasn’t enough, mining expeditions are now colonizing the area to extract lithium and other minerals. The video consists of monumental shots of the glacier’s surface, textures melting, giving away, vanishing into soil and water. Stark whites and turquoises where the ice is still intact. Dull greys and muddy yellows and browns wherever it is melting. The mountain, the ice and sense of locality come to life with great field recordings coupled with the tender and poignant words from Borasino’s poem narration.
The film puts us in both the context of the Southern Andes and the discursive space we are about to engage with in the different installations. This becomes clearer when one opens the adjacent doors, to engage with two texts that contain information from Yolanda Quispe Higuera (local, living at the foot of Quelccaya) and Vito Calderon Villanueva (Human and Environmental rights officer in Puno) who works with ‘communities affected by mining issues.’ These two texts are compiled from dialogues between Borasino, Higuera and Villanueva that are also part of the process behind the film. The dialogues pertain to Quelccaya, the communities around it and their interrelations helping us to come closer to Quelccaya. Their confessional character reverberates that of the tiny room I’m in.
The flood of melted ice guides us into the second room to reveal lost and forgotten images, smells and stories of the soil in AZ OOR’s Issaffen n Irifi (Amazigh for Rivers of Thirst) (2023-present). I realise that this is where the smell was coming from. Wax incense and a raw and emotive mural painting welcome me with its earthy siennas, browns, ochres and primordial patterns and shapes. The smell of the paint is intense, which AZ OOR tried to soften with the incense. The installation is an accumulation of Amazigh (Morocco, North African), African and Arab cultural elements. On one of the walls I read ‘Space craft, Place craft, craft…’ The space functions almost as a portal, a rift in space communicating with all the other places where the Amazigh soil and knowledges have been/will be present. In the centre of the room stands a pile of soil shaped concentrically, like circular vibrations on water. It seems either ready to be sown or like it has been sowed. Surrounded by salt, as if to protect and nurture this soil. Text, research segments, drawings, photographs, sticks and leaves fill the perpendicular walls. It is a rich collage of information, imagination, fact and fiction. When standing right behind the central soil site facing the mural, one can observe how the mural seems to be a diagram of the installation.
While reading the brochure we become informed on how this installation is also an episode from AZ OOR’s ‘indigenous survivance space fiction.’ The key to the effectiveness of this work isn’t in giving us clear-cut answers but in proposing different relationalities to the earth and ourselves. Which are facilitated both through the information on the wall and in the ways the items are placed. In this way AZ OOR attempts to transform the local Amazigh culture to something global. Re-membering, re-configuring. Re-telling stories through space/time craft.
Moving on I enter a space where we are asked: ‘How do we know what we know?’ Right at the entrance there is a row of slippers in vibrant colours forming a gradient. In the centre of the room mats, pillows, text booklets, and two headsets are spread out on the floor. Above the mats and pillows hangs a big entangled structure with many chains and loops. It is made out of thin bamboo that is bent and tied together, suspended mid-air. The slippers signify that we can take off our shoes and get comfortable. Reminiscent of the tradition of leaving our shoes at a designated area before stepping into a room. Shoes –that support our weight and bodies throughout our days, at once barriers and protectors– are also the carriers of embodied knowledge. To leave our shoes at the door is to suspend what we know and enter with an open mind, grounded. To facilitate this, Serena Lee’s Lines and Fields (ongoing) invites us to read along with their voice through headsets. We hear two segments from two chapters of their artistic research on Taijiquan (Tai Chi) and breathing. Four study sessions with Lee are hosted alongside the continuation of this installation.
The text together with the audiobook makes up for a rather interesting experience as we endeavour on a listening embrace about movement, thinking, Chinese martial arts and calligraphy and the interconnectedness of breathing.
On Sunday the 23rd of March, I attended one of the four study sessions with Lee. They showed us movement exercises while being in conversation with some guests. Visiting both the installation independently and the study session I am reminded of returning to the breath and re-centring. We talked about yielding instead of resisting in order to overcome obstacles, blocks, negative points and forces. We are reminded how this is always reflected on a political and activist facet, exploring the application of Taijiquan and its Yin & Yang cosmologies into collectivism and social work.
There is a big contrast between Lee’s work and the previous two as it feels quite cerebral, academic and intellectual. Yet its essence is deeply embodied in breath and movement. These polarities mirror the machinations and movements between thought and act. Hence the reason why the two chapters are called Force and Process. The extensive study of the muddling of the borders between thought and act through Taijiquan and Yin & Yang creates a strong statement on embracing non-binary ways of being and knowing. The lines create a field and the field expands unto other lines. If Lee’s installation would be a body part, it could be that of the head and the brain.
As I grapple with how to catch my breath, I hear deep throat singing (from Manchu Shamanic Composer Han Xiaohan) from deeper into the hallways. I stumble upon a diagram mapping and simulating the distance between two bodies of water: Mother Lake Saimaa and Mother River Sahaliyan Ula (Black Dragon River, Amur river). The simulation of distance and direction between these points is configured by a sentence that is warping from one end to the other that reads:
‘Thawing of the Frozen Rivers unfolds across territories divided by nation states, specifically the Finnish – Russian border, Karelia, Lake Saimaa, and Manchuria region, along the Amur river, a natural border between China’s Northeast and Russia’s far east.’
This is the introduction of Kristiina Koskentola’s Thawing of the Frozen Rivers (2024-2025), and just like that we are transferred into an in-between place where borders have melted and blurred into each other and engendered a triadic video installation. The three projections (one on a central panel, and two opposite each other on the walls) are accompanied by carpets in the centre and a transparent box with three small golden animal figurines. The latter are standing on top of a blue fabric and seem to be guarding the exhibition site. The two wall projections show ritual greeting ceremonies performed by Han Xiaohan. In the central video we learn how shamans synchronize with the energy of the universe by beating the drum. By tuning into that energy the shaman is able to seek guidance from gods, spirits and ancestors. The central video comprises beautiful sequences from the different locations coupled with an insightful and profound voiceover of Koskentola. She often juxtaposes nature, words and indigenous knowledge from different cultures, perhaps seeking a path of oneness through difference, to make the body whole (again). It is a kind of effort to initiate the audience to different ways of living where bodies relate in a completely different way than today’s world that is brimming with the rational, divisions, borders, and superficiality.
The extensive study of the muddling of the borders between thought and act through Taijiquan and Yin & Yang creates a strong statement on embracing non-binary ways of being and knowing.
In this way Koskentola bends the body of the exhibition onto itself, where the frozen rivers meet the melting glacier. While this is the last room, it feels like now I can see the entire exhibition with new eyes (and shoes). The struggles of different indigenous knowledges and communities that face colonialist and capitalist damage come in conversation with each other. As such, a sort of manual is created that emulates a re-membering of the body that rejects anthropocentrism as the ideological hegemony. A mending of the self with the other, without eliminating each other. Like Yin and Yang. A life preserver for discombobulated bodies in a digitally connected world. Re-minding us of how we embody nature and mind the nature bodies.
The exhibition Sensing the Ways: On Touch, Story, Movement, and Song is running until the 25th of May at Casco.
Savvas Gerolemidis
is a visual artist focusing on painting, drawing and installation
