Stills for a game

an

arterial

dance

over

and

over

rolling

her

other

limb

across

her

skin

a

twisting

testing

these arms

descending

wrapping

hybrid forms

a  teasing

conversation

skin

against bark

bark against

skin

the screen

plays

with the rebound

light

with the sounds

a new pulse…

Images: Video – Tender Space II – Tender Grip, Electro Studio Project Space, St Leonards on Sea. November 2023. A Performance, video and photo exhibition with Claudia Kappenberg and Jenny Swingler, following a two week on site residency.

10 months have past since I was here…

A fissure appears and then somehow knits together again…

Something new slowly appears like thick blood seeping through a narrow wound…

Time and process…

A Tender_Space…emerges.

A dialogue with our porous borders…tender as a scar, tender as a warning, tender as love letter, tender as a grief, tender as a longing, tender as a cage.

Where the space cracked and time loops, the body asks questions that may never be answered…

Tender as a meaning that doesn’t quite settle…

Images above – ‘A Rehearsal for Repair ‘ ‘Back to Normal’ – A sense of familiarity at Electro Studios Project Space, St Leonards on Sea as part of PhotoHastings Season, November 2022.

when

you

can’t

do

anything

but

bite

your

own

hand

tender_

space…

July 2021, and I am starting an intriguing new Artist Residency at the De La Warr Pavilion,  Bexhill, as part of an England’s Creative Coast commission, and supported by the Syrian Resettlement Project, East Sussex.

Artist Holly Hendry’s Indifferent Deep, alongside Invertebrate, currently on show at the DLWP,  absorbs  both internal and external spaces, and will be  the starting point to this co creative lab within the galleries and external gallery spaces.

In partnership with my my ongoing two year Site Line project, a series of experimental lens based workshops with refugees, and in collaboration we will use mobile phones, and our bodies, exploring  through the use of photography, somatic walks, and texts, new encounters with  edges, borders and the spaces beneath.

Notations

1/4

‘Indifferent Deep’…I like this title. The distance between the two words paired together , the emotional load of each. The choreography that appears…

Words that invite us to navigate new spaces, to encounter the building as both an architectural and a physical body. To enter, interrupt, sooth and play. Bodies within a body.

Today we are a movement in four parts. A dance of expectation, noticing, creating escape hatches, fits of anxiety, and familiarity …

And so we begin a process  of navigating, disturbing …

We explore through the eye of the camera (mobile phone) and our sensing eye. We move from space to space, leaning, arching, looking up, down, and glancing sideways. We become archaeologists, peering through layers, and physicians as we Stand in front of illuminated intestines…

With mirrors, we create escape hatches, and seductive windows.  We play with the forensic tilts of light and fragmentation…

so much can be done without touching …

another time perhaps we will move with these mirrors? Planned/ unplanned …these windows, these distortions…how will we enter/exit the frame? Will our bodies leak into a different space?

2/4

Movement as a sound walk within the acoustic ecology of the building, it’s architectural spaces, it’s body and it’s hollows. At the end of the gallery  we stop at a large mounted sculpture. The back appears like a free form ear, and so we put our ears against it, and listen, only to discover a mesmerising echo as we whisper to each other…

We create fractured views and  little islands with groups of mirrors, splintering across the spaces and regrouping like magnets…like atoms reforming to recast energy.

Acts  of fracturing…in medicine it is the interruption of the integrity of the bone, and in geology it indicates the earth that splits, crumbles, moves .  Within a more humanistic context, fracture could configure as distance, isolation wound and trauma…

3/4

Further acts of fracturing.
Our choreography shifts around the building.
Above and below roof and ground, altering spacial membranes…

We speak to each other through texts. Texts morph into a movement with mirrors , refracted light and secret messages.
Interruptions and interpretations.

Image: Paloma Sourtchev

4/4

Extending  and elongating the borders of this building we walk to meet the sea.

We carry the building ‘memory ‘ within our bodies, and carry, like portals,  small round mirrors.

Our path is across the lawn and down white glittery steps. We reflect and catch the afternoon light and dance the reflections across the white stone.

Now the tide is coming in. We immerse the mirrors in the salty water. They take the appearance of underwater moons…

An unfolding of images, sound walks, voices and listening became part of this creative lab at the DLWP. An immersive process that opened up new questions…

How does a building breath? How does it shift in time?Where does it believe it’s borders are?
And can we ask the same of ourselves …

With thanks to the DLWP, Bexhill on Sea.

A diary of the project can also be found here:

https://www.dlwp.com/site-line-a-residency-with-nicole-zaaroura/

7 live performances to camera …

within a certain time frame, and within a specific frame of space, new movement emerges…

ways to love..

light grips my hands and I roll it around like clay…Like promises, like water perhaps…

my tendons, in a dance , in a message, hold the weight of balance and trust, but for who?

I push a stone, very slowly, to the edge of the surface and let it fall.

I hold an egg behind my back, and roll and slide to the edge of my fingers , tempting and teasing.

I pass a stick slowly down the length of my spine, and through this I see how far I can travel.

My hands pull and twist within a wire cage. Where to go next.

I take charcoal from the beach, and my fingers surround it like a clam shell, each movement creates a black dust shadow drawing on my hand …

haptic/hybrid/somatic/visceral/yielding/body/space/

exchange/encounter/acts of resistance/