SPIRITS READ FOUCAULT (2015-2019)
Conceived, written and performed by: Silvia Battista
Duration: 20/30 min.
Written and performed by Silvia Battista. Filmed by Massimiliano Ferraina
RUINS festival (2021);
Hyderabad University, India (2016);
Rhodes University, South Africa (2016);
Greenwich University in London (2015);
Goldsmith University, London (2015);
www.ruins.media
Conceived, written and performed by: Silvia Battista
Duration: 20/30 min.
Written and performed by Silvia Battista. Filmed by Massimiliano Ferraina
RUINS festival (2021);
Hyderabad University, India (2016);
Rhodes University, South Africa (2016);
Greenwich University in London (2015);
Goldsmith University, London (2015);
www.ruins.media
What: Spirits Read Foucault consists in a performance-research-experiment that employs storytelling, guided visualization and active imagination. Broadly, the performance unfolds as it follows: a performer, physically or digitally present, guides the participants into mindful exercises to activate their active imagination. They include observation, reflections and internal visualizations until the narrative reaches a different level of engagement with visions of body's dismemberment until nothing of the body is left to see (see video output).
The aim is experiential and pedagogical wherein performance is used as a vehicle to guide audiences to reflect on death, on the meanings of our embodied lives, on what – if something – remains after death, and on the boundaries between the material and the spiritual. The research’s intention is led by the hypothesis that embodiment, this intertwined body-mind liminal complex, is an order of materiality that actually crosses beyond its discrete boundaries to meet the spiritual. The two are paradoxically two and one at the same time. Performance can be the trigger for the emergence of such an awareness and the technology through which to experience it.
The real Spirits Read Foucault happens in the imaginary space of each participant, therefore there are as many performances as the number of participants. The most important contribution is indeed left by them. I collected their contributions anonymously in the feedback section, which can be found below. There you can find stories, reflections and reactions; all worth reading.
What I have written and performed is indeed merely a trigger, an activator to reveal a diversity of ways in which we, as humans, think and engage with our condition of embodiment and its unavoidable disappearance.