What is the body?

A body of knowledge, spreads itself, open and regenerative, desiring. What is the Body? My body, this collective body, this body of text. This body of water. Cleansing itself, regenerating, dying and birthing itself anew with every movement, every thought and skin shed, every in and out breath, every revolution gone, party celebrated, war ended, every intimacy or trauma experienced. It is my home in this life, this ocean of possibilities – this transformative vessel through unknown trajectories. There are so many stories still to tell, to unveil and to discover.

I recently had an experience of this body, all knowledges together as a soup, my soup. The intelligence of this precarious beloved home cut open with doctors and nurses holding my hand, the touch of comfort counteracting the trauma of a blade. There at once, the body's intelligence. Knowing how to bleed, how to receive, how to remove illness, how to heal, how to love. The body knowing how to believe in its own capacity for change, for social-political transformation. It's protest, it's polemic.

It's need.

Defined by its variations, skin colour, genitalia, dis/ability etc it is culturally prescribed specific physical freedoms and socio-political limitations, hegemonically. Still. Born of possibilities. Due to socio-cultural conditions it adopts specific behaviours and customs to which it prescribes or rebels, contesting the subjugations of its cultural categorisations.

The body is the ultimate paradox, a bondage transgressed, simple and yet extremely complex, requiring the longest length of study in order to understand its workings, limited by it's materiality and yet defined by this precise sense of infinite possibility for change of political perspective and understanding through it.

In all senses.

I am asked. To present myself. In so many ways. I am present. There I am on a stage, on a table, a platform, a diving board, presenting the possibilities of my female agency from which to spring. The spring is a fountain of infinity. The body becomes a passage even in death, filled with so many possibilities. For resistance, for surrender. For choice. This body, my body, this collective body, this body of text, this body of water, can keep politically evolving, this fountain of knowledge.

Text written for Houston exhibition Public communication: Performing knowledge of the Body in January 2015, curated by Joe Joe Orangias.
http://splx.org/public-communication-performing-knowledge-of-the-body/