Joya: AiR / Hazel Dowling / UK

A Performance To Camera-as text-as songs-as movement

"Pressure sensors in the feet communicate instantly with the brain, internal organs and other body parts, in extreme danger the feet must be prepared to participate in fleeing, they do this by processing environmental information gathered through the soles, helping the brain to determine how much oxygen to release, over time this communication speeds up and allows us to adapt to the rhythm of running.

Can traces of history and past events be found in our nervous system and in our muscles, can we discover these through movement?

This landscape demands that I give way to instinct and surrender to its pulse.

According to Lamarck genetic assimilation allows an animals response to environmental stress to become a fixed part of its developmental repertoire so that characteristics formed in a given environment can be inherited and retained, even outside of the conditions of that environment, Lamarck calls this phenotypic plasticity.

Knowing this landscapes requires knowing my body, a coordination of eyes and feet, even whilst watching the sky and the land, whilst calling out, sounding the mountain, sounding the well. I walk through clumps of silence, startling. I strategise over grains and potential scores, of dividing space, documenting human interventions, measuring the distance between trees and equalising space with a grid, offering a segment to the other artists...does this landscape choreograph me?

A fugue is a contra-punctual composition in which a short melody or phrase is introduced by one part and successively taken up by others and developed by interweaving parts

Or it is a loss of awareness of ones identity, often coupled with a flight from ones usual environment

There are bee's drowning at the old well. There is a trough with a plastic tube that runs into a bath, its a hot day but there is ice floating in the tub, it fixes the bees in a curving pattern that oscillates to the hum of those flocking to the water that pours from the arched mound of mud and bricks, through the tube, flooding the trough, into the tub., they circle with a low drone.

I keep walking, consuming every old stump, the shape of the dry wood, grains, almond shells, mounds of soil sitting in pyramids next to the shallow ditches, formed in their creation, one has a thick wadge of coarse bush protruding 

I pick up the sole of the heel of a shoe, a heavy sole, turned on in its side, you could say it was the shape of the mounds of the hills in the middle distance and the lumpy protruding old well, all formed with an arching top and a flat base.

Dung in the dining room, dung on the floor, the floor made of dung, dung surrounding the decrepit remains of a manger, climbing onto hardened dung, hearing the beetles tunnelling through, corroding, consuming, digging down, removing 8 tons of dung, collecting  it and drying it up then grinding it into a fine dust, cracking an egg through your hands to form a fine paint.

The weather report states that there is a 100% probability of rain, a deluge, it will fill up the fields and run down the barrancos and into the ramblers and off to the sea".

Hazel Dowling