dance artist & anthropologist
A basal animal; location: home
... was presented as part of the 6th UniArts Helsinki Research Pavilion artistic research exhibition "Idiorrhythmic Imaginaries" in 2025, curated by Henk Slager.
The exhibition brought together 17 artistic researchers, who responded to Roland Barthes’ text, "How to Live Together", written in the 1970s, by seeking alternate individual and collective rhythms for co-existence.
Now, fifty years later, the question is: what is the value and significance of idiorrhythmic imagination in a world that, because of increased divisions and tensions, emphatically calls for clear positions on various planetary urgencies? But also: how can the current practice of artistic research provide an impetus for a necessary reassessment of this concept?
In the context of my artistic somatic embodiment practice, I approach the question of idiorrhythmicity from an organismic-cellular perspective with an intention to highlight the differential becomings – in tempo, intensity and extension – when people are able to listen to and resonate with their pre-individual dynamics of organisation. For example, by tuning into basal forms of organisation present during our embryogenesis and in organisms with less differentiated body plans, such as the Placozoa.
Medium: Video, audio score, spatiomaterial installation (mesh lycra, rubber strings, foam rubber, faux fur, polyester)
In collaboration with textile artist Juulia Aleksandra Mikson.
Before we became human
– organisms of numerous differentiated tissues, highly effective nervous system regulation, with cultured embodiments – there was “a simpler time”. A time when we were amorphous bundles of cells, swarming through liquid spaces, sensing-moving-knowing simultaneously through direct cellular touch and communication, without a central “I” to direct.
My ongoing practice of embodying the logics of basal animals – such as placozoa, often called “the simplest animals on Earth” – does not seek to return to the past. Rather, it invites us to consider and experience how basal modes of organization – where touching, perceiving, moving, and knowing are coterminous – remain available and accessible within us, even as 21st-century humans.
How might it affect us to go lower – into the depths of embodiment – to the basics of bodying like a placozoan?
The spatial installation includes an over-sized cellular membrane that visitors can enter into and listen to the somatic audio score from. The membrane provides a sense of safety and boundedness, whilst its porousness affords exchange and connection to life around the cellular space. Thus, the person embraced by the membrane perceives a simultaneous sense of being protected whilst in relation. Just like cells, who have an internal milieu but hold ongoing biochemical exchanges with the extracellular milieu.
A basal animal / score Relax into the experience of yourself: your selves, your cells. I soften the pointy end of my attention directed outwards, re-turning towards my mushy beingness, to the vibrant colony of lives within. I call forth the multiple and diverse points of reference, of sensing and making sense – my cells. I go to another layer of self-hood under the pointy tip of “I” – to a we-hood, in the embrace of my skin. I relax the membranes covering my eyes and the muscle fibers running to the back of my head respond. I allow my facial muscles to melt, lips to soften, tongue to release. I let soften the inside of my mouth, my throat, vocal cords and esophagus, my stomach and intestines. My cells respond to the call of gravity and air. Opening. I/we give into the real weight and real time and real space of tiny fleshy things. Each cell of my being touching approximately seven other cells. Bodily matter is a fluid space made of touches, of cellular kisses. Like a domino effect (affect): softening my cellular membranes… softening these places of bounding, holding, of deciding what enters and what remains out, places of protection, of vulnerability… Softening the cellular membranes in one place of my body evokes a wave-like contagion through my cellular space. The cells pass along the message, body to body, touch to touch: We can be soft! They make sense together. I just observe. …not just a body in space, a body going through space, but A body of space – of morphological potentialities. A space where matter was/is/will be tender. Where membranes do not stand still, because molecules in this vibrant interface keep shifting space-place. A space of loose relations. My boundary (boundaries) flows out of form. No head or tail, no left or right, no up or down – but a swarming cellular animal undulating-traversing the environment. Touching-knowing with every micro-inch of our body our way through the world. I/we see with touches. I/we touch-know. Moved from within. Moved from a trillion locales of desire for movement. “I” is just a passenger, enjoying the ride – the joyride of the fluid boundaries and internal structures of becoming.
Still from the "A basal animal; location: home" video work
The video work shows me embodying the organisational logics of basal multicellular animals. Approached from a minimalist, even comical-conceptual arte povera angle, I move with a blue mesh "cellular membrane" around my home. Dissolving bones, embodying the shifting flows of fluids within, touching-knowing through the environment , I become a body of matter mattering through space.