My body cries tears of beauty

The project visually explores the body as a space; as the porous barrier that delimits the energy of our individual souls, and the vehicle that carries us though this material plain.

The project takes the body as the main object of of study, it looks at it from multiple dimensions; in one sense it is the porous barrier that delimits the energy of our individual souls, and their relation to the outer world. In that regard, it can be concieved of as the material entity that humanises us, a vehicle of sorts, which carries us through this material plain.

In Ibn al Arabi's sufi analysis, there are four types of human bodies, Adam's, which was created out of nothing, Eve's, which was created out of the body of a man (i.e. Adam), Jesus' who was created out of the body of a woman ( i.e) Mary, and the standard human created as a result of copulation between man and woman. Modern day posibilities with regards to human creation, including test tube babies etc, have made way for new interpretations about the nature of that creation . The project is thus interested in exploring the body as an object of creation, with its own unique processes, its various dimensions and functions, its movement, and its interpretations.

On a broader scale, the body has come to be seen as a symbol of the nation, especially in fascist terms; a strong fit youthful body has been employed to create subliminal ideas about the body of the nation, powerful, strong, muscluar, or in feminine terms, motherly, voluptous, caring. Many a nationalist endevour has sought to introduce physical education as a means to create a collective sense of nationalist sacrifice; the body had to be trained well, in order to defend the nation, it was no longer a space unique to the individual soul that it housed, but rather, a collective space, to be sacrificed in the defence and protection of a collective, standardised society, 'the nation'.Therefore a stong felxible youth would translate into a strong flexible nation, while a weak collective body, could be raped and pillaged.

The project is inpsired by my own experience of being unable to move for months, as a resulted of a herniated disc and an inflamed spinal cord. That experience, of being totally present and able mentally, but physicially being unable to express myself, completely transformed my connection with my own body. It offered me a new way of percieveing the body as a space in and of itself. My physical self and my mental self developed new forms of communication, and through them, I was inspired to think of healing as both a mental and a physical process, interdependent and entwined. It is this intelligence with which the body functions that I am totally fascinated by; how it is linked to our emotional self, how it send messages to express its pain, how this is all linked to our energetic selves and what happens to it after our spirits move on. These are the themes that I would like to explore further and somehow commnunicate visually through this project.