Category: ATHLETICISM

Swimming My Way to Failure

Sandy Gibbs “Hail the great swimmer! Hail the great swimmer!” the people shouted. —Franz Kafka, Fragments When I was young, more than anything else in the world I wanted to be an Olympic swimmer. I can’t swear to the longevity…

The Italic I (Studio as Gymnasium)

The Italic I is a practice-based collaboration between writer-artist Emma Cocker and interdisciplinary artist Clare Thornton, that explores the various states of potential made possible through purposefully surrendering to the event of a repeated fall. Within our artistic investigation, the act of falling is apprehended consciously as a training exercise for both mind and muscle, tested out in physical, cognitive, and even linguistic terms. Our inquiry comprises an attempt to capture and communicate the event of falling visually and linguistically, through the prism of performance, photography and the generation of a poetic lexicon. The studio or gallery is approached as a gymnasium within which to practice falling; however, the purpose of practicing is not towards a telos, the perfection of a given move or some future performance. Rather, falling is repeated in a move towards deeper understanding, for becoming more sensitized to the experience, more attuned to its risings and falls, its intensities and durations. In these terms, the athleticism inherent within the activity itself becomes a means for increasing one’s capacity (as it is practiced), for producing unexpected forms of embodied knowledge and augmented subjectivity.