K3 MAGAZIN #14

It is as if the human presence could not place anything else than what is already
given there. But this lack of an object, of something that is constructed and
placed to be seen or used, is not a carelessness. It is, above all, a care in relation to
its own wildness. Having never set foot in that space, I needed to ask questions
like: ‘where does the air flow in this room?’ or ‘does it get too hot when the light
passes through you?’, almost an approximation that we have to have when we
enter a forest: ‘when does it get dark?’, ‘is it too steep?’, ‘which shoes to wear?’.
Since we choose to not add anything in advance, I imagine that in WILD the
space is shown while the public is willing to observe more - turning their heads
and twisting their necks - to what has always been there. Hence the numerous up
and down arrows and the various lines curving away from the center of the space
in the drawing above. Different magnitudes and mechanical movements of light,
displacements of the performers out of the initial vision field, the ring reflection
to other points in space and the sound spatialization are just some of the
elements that allow the space to be revealed without a scenography that
organizes it. It is from what happens and what emanates from the body that space
will change. Or, as it appears in the title of a 1968 work by Lygia Clark: The
House is the Body. Or rather: ‘The stage is the body’.
A Brazilian work whose name is WILD may seem strange, given that it does not
carry the clichés that link our country to that word. Without sweat, odors,
represented animality or nudity, this work reminds us that the radical nature of
the body’s contemporary experience in Brazil also goes through places far from
this cliché (which, despite selling well, is not entirely real).
I am not saying that the above elements do not exist in the Brazilian experience,
but I believe that our contemporary art has always needed to create, in relation to
Brazilian daily life, something that Foucault named as ‘heterotopias’: countersites
in which the usual sites from our culture are found, but where they are
“simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted” 1 . It is worth noting how,
when trying to exemplify these heterotopias, Foucault cited both the theatre
stage and a farm bedroom in Brazil:
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