January, 11th, 2022
About when I didn't know what it meant to feel the lack of air to breathe with Covid-19. This photograph was taken Last semester to our Wild Profiles at HoPP (Home of Performance Practices). We could choose what “wild” means to us, to have a profile picture. I was not sure what to do, so I simply wrapped up my head with this plastic foil. I gave time to myself to understand how to manage, behave and mostly, to breathe. I remember I couldn't really open my eyes, they were slightly open. While trying to breathe, the plastic surface in contact with my skin started to accumulate very tiny water droplets. The air was condensing inside. I thought: “my head is in an entirely different environment from the rest of my body!”
That inner experience fragmented me and it affected how I relate to the external environment. That plastic foil acted as an inside out interface, which was not facilitating my interaction with people, but provoked people around me to guide me walking or check in whether I was okay. Strange to think that was also a barrier, as a super mask that goes throughout your entire face/head. I could breathe. But not in the range and pace that I used to. I came back to this experience because when I tried to speed up when I was walking in my living room, suddenly my body connected to that experience. But now without the plastic foil. I felt the lack of air, the sensation that I would faint because of the lack of air due to covid. To breathe fully, in the maximum of my lungs is an effort.
I felt challenged by the experience on that day, in keeping the plastic foil during the whole gathering to take the photos. And now I also feel challenged by my condition, which is a reality, and not a pretense. Although, it was real to feel the lack of air, but caused by a plastic foil. Currently, it is scary to feel the lack of air caused by a virus.
My mind shifts now to the class of today, January 11th - Transgression, to think that in this photograph of mine there is a truth and it produces its own truth, my personal experience.
I question the transgression embedded in it. There is the condition that all of us depend on to live, which is to breathe, (besides other things, of course). The experience of keeping a plastic foil wrapped on my head, stretched my limit on how to breathe. Also conditioned me to breathe in such a way in order to not get suffocated. “Transgression gives the simultaneous experience of both a radical disruption and a reformulation of limits (Sargeant, J., Deathtripping: the extreme underground, 2008, 40), I understand in this example the emphasis and importance of breathing as well as forging the lack of air.
During the class we discussed situations of transgressing the law, the audience rules, taboos, a system, a person, among others; the purpose of art transgressing to: and the question was, “on what?”
The transgressive is reflexive, questioning both its own role and that of the culture that has defined it in its otherness. It is not simply a reversal, a mechanical inversion of an existing order it opposes. Transgression, unlike opposition or reversal, involves hybridization, the mixing of categories and the questioning of the boundaries that separate categories. It is not, in itself, subversion; it is not an overt and deliberate challenge to the status quo. What it does do, though, is implicitly interrogate the law, pointing not just to the specific, and frequently arbitrary, mechanisms of power on which it rests – despite its universalization pretension – but also to its complicity, its involvement in what it prohibits (Jervis, 1999, 4 apud Jenks, C., 2003, Transgression. London & NewYork: Routledge, p.93).
This photograph is transgressive on the human condition of breathing, something that everyone can connect regardless of religion, race, gender and citizenship. Inherently connected to our current pandemic moment in the world, that already took so many lives. It also sets the certainty of mortality.
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