Ascension

  1. Suspension reborn as ascension — the body suspended in its becoming.
  1. Ascension 2025 will soon unfold as a NFT series.
  2.  
  3. Ascension emerges as a re-reading of the performance Corpus Pendulus, created through the dialogue between corporeal memory and contemporary processes of creation with artificial intelligence.
  4. If in the original performance the suspended body was the pulsating center of the experience, here it expands into images that evoke the same tension between weight and surrender, flesh and transcendence, presence and ephemerality.
  5. More than a representation, it is an aesthetic reverberation: fragments of a past action reconfigured into dreamlike visual landscapes, where the suspended body finds new possibilities of existence.

Corpus Pendulus P-XIII’

Original photographic documentation of the performance, presented here as both reference and integral part of the artistic research process.
  1. Reflections on Performance
  2.  
  3. Performance is pure process, an unrepeatable event. As Beatriz Medeiros observes, “to speak of it is always to be partial: each from their own limited perspective. This art is a reflection of perceptions of a particular imaginary, all within a unique and precise moment” (MEDEIROS, 2007).
  4. If performance is a living body in its instant, could we fragment this time, this body, this memory? “The one who constructs a discourse about an action annihilates it. In the text, the performance is flayed. Outside its time, it is emptied and enclosed within photographic or video reproductions” (MEDEIROS, 2007). And yet, we persist in trying to name the smoke, to gather echoes of what has already passed.
  5. My writing emerges in this place: in a state of apnea, suspending breath voluntarily, as a gesture of survival — “the survival of the artistic work,” as Medeiros points out. To make words into performance may perhaps be the least invasive act. To improvise in writing as one improvises in the act itself — an exercise in memory, a sensitive account of the suspended body. Inhale, exhale, and hold: we move toward the next suspension.
  6.  
  7. * Maria Beatriz de Medeiros — artist, researcher, and professor — Performance Art and Time, 2007.
  1. Corpus Pendulus P-XIII’, 2012*
  2. Ephemeral corporeal experience fixed in memory.
  3.  
  4. Physical, psychic, and universal corporeality.
    Phenomenological perceptions — the body in movement sensing space.
    The body produces subjectivities, creating possible truths.
    Would it have the same purpose if the body did not feel pain?
    How much pain can the body endure?
    This pulsating agony, which is nothing more than a distorted pleasure, a fearful awakening of the body.
    A body that overflows with vital energy, in a single breath.
    Time on its side, yet ephemeral, soon it fades.
    Pendular, circular, twisting, and flexing — a solo dance in the air.
    No other intention but the sensory and perceptual experience.
    An embodied and volatile extension.
    Luminous reverberation in the blue sky.
    The balance between bridges.
    The whistling of the wind and its variations of intensity was the only sound possible to embrace me.
    Nothing broke. Neither skin nor steel.
    The air absorbed in the act left my body over the days.
    Scars as companions for life, like all the others I carry involuntarily.
    Performance held me by the flesh. And time by art.
  5.  
  6. *Sibylla Arnbjörg