LINGERING BODIES

This exhibition presents the body of work of BraveNewwWorld, a collective and online videogame, in relation to Pablo Baresch’s installation La Carne and in collaboration with some of the collectives and agents that are part of Espacio Odeón, a space of collectives that used to be an art space, built over the ruins of a theater, in the city center of Bogotá.

As a transdisciplinary and co-collaborative initiative, BravenewwWorld has sought to expand performative space by approaching the intimacy of the theatrical through the interactive language of a videogame. During COVID, the great migration raised questions around the prejudices of face-to-face interactions and the mustering of affections toward the web. Particularly from within the performing arts, where there is a great bias based on the idea that the digital space cannot actually create intimacy neither amongst the actors nor the spectators. It has become urgent to question this.
BNW offers new narrative possibilities that invite all types of listeners, while also seeking to expand the idea of otherness by centering bodies and discourses considered to be “other”. The Internet and numeric spaces–understood, for the purposes of this text as places of dissidence and indiscipline–, have always provided these “other” bodies with the possibility to think of themselves as beyond the physical form, expanding toward digital forms and augmented realities: chatrooms, avatars, videogames…Each of these iterations of I and other are ultimately the confirmation that we can exist beyond our physical shells. The porosity between URL/IRL provides us with the opportunity to construct new identities, to become a glitch in hegemonic structures, to be multiple, to reinvent ourselves over and over again.
As part of the exhibition Lingering Bodies/Cuerpos Persistentes–caos y carne digital–, BNW presentes a large-scale experience and invites us to reconsider our relationship with and toward our prisons of flesh (physical and/or digital), whether they are our own or somebody else’s. This interactive narrative, segmented into chapters | Unknown Flowers | Oferenda | Cuerpx Cero | A_VOID , addresses notions of desire, language and corporeality, along with the transactions that traverse them. The chapters, staggered and presented throughout the exhibition, are accompanied by a series of activations (condensations) carried out between the artist of BNW and some of the members of Espacio Comunal.

As visitors ascend the staircase placed at the entrance of the exhibition space, they will enter the ghost of a theater where they will find a projection of BMW’s videogame, along with the gaming station that allows its navigation. Ahead of them is the austere and metaphorical reconstruction of what was once the grandstand: theater seats face a stage that no longer necessarily fulfills that function.
A cold and sharp, sinuous and motionless volume, composed of hundreds of stars made of concrete, now inhabits and traverses the architectural ghost. Here, the stars are not sources of light, but rather of darkness; they stand out, not because of their brightness, but because of the sharpness of their tips. Said volume arises from the sonic image of a whip from which hundreds of pentagrams hang, swinging in the sky before falling as a lash, as a form of punishment. A powerful gesture that lies in rest and elicits multiple polarities. La Carne evokes a naked body, a skeleton, an armor of dead flesh, of lightless celestial bodies that compact upon each other.

Both proposals (BNW and La Carne), call on a presence mediated by touch and fragility, even when they come in violent forms or through robust materials. Pablo’s objects seek to be used in order to disrupt or breach the flesh, that fleshy interface that mediates and contains our experience in this world. As such, a sort of hypersensible/amorphous/deep wound heals itself through the contemplation of extreme states: languidness and rigidity.
A bellicose weapon rests in the exhibition space. One whose hilt simultaneously implies both adoration and punishment. In this case, Pablo’s whip lies motionless, stripped of its use, of its function to inflict wounds. A respite from defense and punishment in a space where the very objects that can produce these wounds are present. Their non-functionality, however, paves the road toward other ways of being in the world and in our bodies.

Lingering Bodies/Cuerpos Persistentes —caos y carne digital— is an exhibition produced and co-curated by BraveNewwWorld, MSD and Tatiana Rais.