The BodyBuilding Project
Installation, artistic research and events as part of "Excavations", HIAP Gallery Augusta (Helsinki, FI) 2015
The BodyBuilding Project is a shared inquiry into the sensibilities, subjectivities and relational capacities we - as interdependent beings - might beneficially develop in response to the planetary urgencies we currently face. It encourages us to reimagine the propensities currently identified as “human,” and to begin building bodies capable of prefiguring life beyond our collapsing horizons.
The project consists of a perennial artistic research process and a series of public events created collaboratively by a growing body of artists, theorists and practitioners. Our aim is to develop a series of embodied practices that can be sustained both individually and collectively and transmitted in a variety of ways.
In the Summer of 2015, taking varying multispecies forms, The BodyBuilding Project inhabited HIAP Gallery Augusta as part of the Excavations exhibition. During the exhibition, The BodyBuilding Project inhabited the gallery space and its immediate surroundings along with the other exhibited projects and artworks. The process of inhabiting manifested in the form of open practice sessions and public events as well as materials, texts and objects of various kinds. The immaterial and material processes accumulated and evolved throughout the entire duration of the exhibition, creating an evershifting constellation of human and nonhuman bodies that spread both into the gallery and onto the island.
Towards the end of the exhibition, the project organized a two-day event titled The BodyBuilding Project: A Non-Conclusion. The first day consisted of a series of exercises that moved the participants through a variety of perceptual registers, offering them ways of exposing themselves to the unknown within and around them. During the day, the group reflected on the ways in which it responded to uncertainty, as well as to forces and forms of life that are beyond our control and understanding. The second day was set up as a durational state of not-knowing: each participant could choose the way in which they wished to orient themselves to the event. The proposals of the previous day would serve as possible entrances and landing sites without defining or determining the course of events.
Current Research Body: Saara Hannula, Anniina Ala-Ruona, Outi Condit, Ilpo Heikkinen, Robert Kocik, Satu Palokangas, Alan Prohm, Tommi Vasko and Carmen C. Wong
The BodyBuilding Project: A Non-Conclusion (2015)
