Drifting Bodies Fluent Spaces, Conference on Walking Arts, Guimares, Portugal, 2020

Cloud Dans Lab, The Hague, 2019

Liquidity at the Floating University, Berlin 2018

LIQUIDITY / who leads and who follows?

On 1 January 2018 I decided to practice letting go. I had no idea what that meant but this was going to be a serious and sustained practice. It would last at least a year: I was inspired by Teh Ching Hsieh’s One Year Performances (again).

I got up, put on the meditation timer and I stood in the room. That first attempt was going to last 10 minutes.

I know a little bit about surrendering through the practice of Collapse. Liquidity wasn’t going to be a collapse though: my question was about the possibility of moving from one point to another across space in the state of ‘letting go’. What I mean by this is without the conscious intention to get there, or perhaps taking a very unpredictable path in order to arrive.

This is what happens:
Just as I did when I first came across collapse, the tension I am holding comes out of transparency and becomes salient. The game was to just observe, do nothing, let it appear. As expected I could feel my own weight being dragged by gravity: what would this movement of liquidity become? How would my body move without any will intention on my part? Even suspending all will and intention comes about through an act of will. I did nothing. But as expected, my legs became soft and my weight was sinking.

There is another movement happening: blood and its flow, and I can hear its sound as if amplified. I am not willing it, and I also can’t make it recede. It just happens. So I placed my most subtle point of attention on it, and I begin to move with it.
How do you get from point A to point B by surfing the tide of your own blood? How do you navigate across space in defiance of gravity’a downward drag and, by attempting to achieve zero gravity movement while your feet are firmly placed on the earth?

That evening, I wrote:

For at least five minutes per day I will stop all other activity, stand in a particular point, and visualise the space surrounding my body to be liquid. That is, viscous, thicker than air, and so, this imagining will develop something. What? At the moment I don’t know. There is an altered sense of the body, of consciousness and of movement. This is all I know for now, but with each daily practice it will develop into further knowing. I will record the time I spent practising liquidity. I will use wearable technology to measure some of the biodata of this activity. My aim is to glitch the categories of the technology in order to introduce a new one, liquidity: ‘how to be like water.’