Maps of touch
2022

    Maps of touch (2022) is a revisitation of the project of the same name started in 2015 on Suomenlinna, a rocky island in Helsinki. Starting from a relationship with that place, I think of an idea of ​​alternative cartography, through a small performance, in which I lay down on a rock that seemed to have been carved to accommodate my body, like a kind of tomb. I invoke the potential of performative immobility or of a “weak (human) action” as Tuija Kokkonen calls it, an action of presence in time that does not remove anything or interfere with the place. In this reformulation and re-presentation of Maps of touch, the experience is documented through a photograph on tracing paper and a video with multiple layers, which recovers a direct memory of contact with the rock. Through thin and transparent surfaces, an encounter between body and matter is documented, suggesting a reflection on geology, dematerialization and disappearance. Starting from the cadence of breathing and its manipulation, in video, landscape and body become one, until a progressive immobility, suggests an interpenetration and action of times: between geological time, slow time of sedimentation and affectation, human time (organic time, inexorable / psychological time, malleable) and technological time (accumulation of images, data, prostheses of memory).