FOR THAT WE LIE DOWN.
A BODY INTELLIGENT COMMUNITY

With Claudia Heu
Participative performances and improvisational interventions
Selected spots in the public space of Hamburg, Salzburg, Vienna and Yokohama
Conceived with Tobias Draeger

For that we lie down. A body-intelligent community is a participatory performance and intervention on the subject of presence and touch, which was performed at selected locations in the public space of Hamburg, Salzburg, Vienna and Yokohama.

The starting point of the work was the question of a shift of touch – from an intimate interior space to the public space – as a shared experience of contact and presence between participants, spectators and in a collective field to the urban space. How does perception and thinking change during a touch? What does it do to those who are touched and who touch when someone is watching? What does it do to those who watch? How does the place change through touch? How does the place change us?

The participatory performance is made up of two artistic actions – as methods and concrete instructions for action: Touching Sequence and Caring Satellite. In the performative setting, which we call the Touching Sequence, one person lies down and is touched by another, while two people watch as witnesses. They then switch. Everything takes place in concentrated silence.

Other participants orbit the Touching Sequence as satellites. The aim is to absorb and amplify the space, the silence and the presence around the touch sequence, to carry it further into the urban space. The Caring Satellites work synchronously and touch and mark the place itself, with their bodies, with materials found on site (leftover, collected, architectural, discarded) and with artistic means brought along (charcoal, sand, water, clay), which are added as a space of possibility.

For that we lie down. A body-intelligent community is an attempt to create conditions for new encounters and relationships between bodies, materials and objects: to allow objects and subjects that normally never touch each other to meet, to reinforce traces of ruptures, to narrate the untold and to question hierarchies. Is it possible in this presence to allow the city to be experienced as a subject, as a living entity?

The focus is on transforming touch from an intimate, private act into a collective experience. Touching to bring a collective, sensitive and empathetic body awareness back to life. Touching to share and exchange body knowledge with people from different cultures, working and living environments. To experience the city as a living organism – in presence work by lying down and touching, directly and indirectly with various materials and objects – and then to reflect on it and make it comprehensible. Here, knowledge of touch and the body is brought from a familiar interior space into living, public places and contexts.