Witchcraft and
memory exercises
Witchcraft and Memory Exercises is a question from the body to the
territory—as a geographic location, but also as a space for the construction of the
self. What is the body, if not the container of all experiences? Where it has been, the
stories it has heard, the way in which the place has shaped its thinking and its actions.
Understanding territory as the construction of both body and thought is where
“literalness” as described by François Zourabichvili allows me to navigate metaphor, to
activate the construction of a body on stage: a body-territory. A paper rabbit that
contains the stories of people’s bodies is built by those who, under the spell of love,
build a body—the body. It is an exercise in collectivity, coordination, and memory.
Love and witchcraft are grounded in the commitment of the people who chose to be part of the construction.
Thanks to:
Sara Sánchez Martín, Ioanna Paramanidou, Lucía Gómez Sánchez,
Constantijn Maathuis, Louis Manuel Maxime Montes, Diego Escobar Xavier. Photos by. Antoine Jaminon.
Politics is the art of living together. — Hannah Arendt
Thought is composed in encounters.
In encounters with others, with space, with situations.
The place where the encounter happens is the same place where thought is composed—it is our territory.
Thinking about our territory immediately locates us within the agent of our thought: our body. To think from the body is to think from a situated
perspective.
To situate the body is to situate thought—to
contextualize the gaze in order to understand the body through its movement, not only its form. It is, then, a question about what those places we’ve been to have told us.
What have the places I’ve been, the people I’ve lived with, and my daily life told me?
What the places, their people, and their movements have told me has shaped my thought, the place of the memories is the space of the reflection in the
construction, it is an archive of the self, an
architecture of the experience.
To share territory is a political adventure.
