Introductory notes
On Monday Cai worked with Luis Saez (from the Debajo del Sombrero team) and the artist Andrés Fernández in a project which consisted in walking the city. On Tuesday Iziar began to develop a creative movement project in the theatre space in Naves Matadero Centro Internacional de Artes Vivas.
Wednesday was a big day for the workshop and Cai worked with several different artists to gauge ideas and possibilities. On Thursday Cai worked with Luisma Marias using water and movement. Friday saw Cai working with Belén Sánchez in the theatre space in Naves Matadero Centro Internacional de Artes Vivas.
Reflections on the session (by Cai Tomos)
As you can read on Wikipedia, "the overview effect is a cognitive shift in awareness reported by some astronauts and cosmonauts during spaceflight, often while viewing the Earth from orbit or from the lunar surface".
“Something happens to you out there,” Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell has said. “You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it.”
The astronaut speaks of a ‘people orientation’, the work with the artist here is about that: a shift in cognition happens when we move out of our habitual perspective of our seeing of ‘others’ or those we, or society have defined as ‘others’.
Our bodies connect the personal and universal. They hold within them a multitude of complexities and stories both known and unknown to us. Art making offers a tool to translate the invisible into visible. We can never get to know fully the complexities of the universe. The feeling of wonder that draws our eyes up to the sky to that vastness can also be applied to each other. But so often it is not.
Freedom is in the unknown. If you believe there is an unknown everywhere, in your own body, in your relationships with other people, in political institutions, in the universe, then you have maximum freedom- John Lilly.
Sitting watching Belen repeat a rhythm on a keyboard time and time and time again. There was relentlessness. Pressing the keys and speaking into the microphone with many voices coming through her. I was lost in absorption, almost hypnotized, drawn so deeply into the quality of her relationship with the immediate present, it became pure duration.
I try to listen. Which includes the ears, the eyes, undivided attention and heart. The act of listening is active; it includes the movement of perception and the movement of awareness. Is this active perception any kind of contribution to Belen’s creative process, sometimes perhaps yes, sometimes perhaps no. Belen is clear as a sword cutting through the air about her inner guide, her inner creative voices.
I see acutely how each artist responds differently to time, how it’s felt in them, and how the art making itself in all its complexity mirrors this perhaps.
Each artist is their own universe. Slowly orbiting an atmosphere, suspended in their own creative act.
My own sense of time slowly disintegrates in the presence of their making. There is a precious waiting that happens here with Debajo Del Sombrero, and in the waiting, the eyes learn to see differently.
Resisting urgency is a political act; resisting progress in a world, which demands it, is a political act.
The work with the artists is an invitation to participate fully in experiencing their time, time not bound by outer progress, but inner progress in service of creativity.
