The naked body and the audience

What did we see? Our silhouettes swelled under the projection of an intense red spotlight while our eyes blinked, adapting to the darkness; we didn’t know the limits of the space in which we were moving until we focused on a place we were pushed into; slowly, the configuration of a body was highlighted, but not yet fully; we were caught up, without knowing where our first impressions were coming from, about what we were seeing; we had already seen similar images of an agitated nakedness, terrifying and intimidating; we feared that body singled out by the spotlight would, at any moment, touch us, even if there was a certain distance between us; we felt that from there a new field of expression should emerge, and we were, of course, willing to be part of it; however, to protect ourselves, we used nervous humour and made childish comments as people do to show they are structurally at the level of confrontation; we thought, at one point, that it was a simulation of an adverse scenario, to provoke us, symbolically conceivable only for some of us, perhaps, better prepared; for the others, it was all simply bewildering; still, we all kept standing up, we were vertical, rigid; until a series of feelings agitated us and manifested itself in a certain roughness of the skin that spread to the whole body.

Under the red light, we identified a full body that imposed itself before us; it was covered in silver as if it were an automaton, but it clearly moved in an organic manner; the display caught our attention firstly because of the visually seductive glitter and reflections of light; slowly, the ritualistic, initiation dimension became evident; we insisted on disqualifying the intention of letting us be cheered by an experience of joint discovery, of mutual recognition, and it was easier to call it an imposture than to unmask it; we saw each other before actions of a sort of primordial domination, daring, maybe in an attempt to summon us to act; but we only thought of ignoring them; let us confess that at that moment we were blocks of cement, shelters of our insecurities and not humble bridges trying to understand what was happening; we were solid towers and not cells to undo ourselves of our certainties; we were definitive territories, not willing to let go of an inch; we resisted, not caring where it would take us; declaration of political discontent, certainly, but we were too anxious to pursue that corporeal figure, we considered deactivating its influence on us and, therefore, we covered it in platitudes; it was naked, apparently vulnerable and, yet, it flaunted a presence greater than ours; we saw ourselves, then, as the troublemakers who are used to being at the end of the line of opportunities and, because of that, being offered none;

We were impenetrable beings and held back; we thought that we had that right of just watching as someone who keeps watch; the sentence (any sentence) even if it hasn’t been uttered, was like a kick in the teeth, and we did not run after its meaning; even if it made us curious, it vanished as soon as we retrieved our customs, which pressured us to go back to what was familiar to us; it is true, the body glowed, illuminating us, but its nakedness provoked incendiary convulsions, since we could not cope with seeing so much exposed flesh, even if it was young, well-defined, firm, perhaps, of an appeasing beauty; our fragility turned into just focusing on reason, as if we were holding ourselves with our fingertips onto glass about to explode;

We said that it was not pretty, that it could not be, accepting transgressions of an electrified body apt to exist, to occupy spaces, to move symbols, furiously, claiming public reactions at the same time that it moved inconsistently, confronting our comfortable narratives, as mere spectators, as well as our worlds and principles; we were compressed like a fist pressuring air; in fact, we could not easily say it was a beautiful act; we suspected that our fantasy of touching a warm body was at play, but that, against all evidence, we repelled it; maybe one day, all the desires we possess may find objects to be satisfied, available objects to be consumed, but that was not the case there; there was a  mismatch; used to sublimating what we instinctively want so that we are not impelled to drift, we resist; we feared that if we pursued a chain of desires, it would not stop growing into desirable configurations that would tie us down to a never-ending cycle; we all wanted to talk, maybe about silly things, only because the slips that our tongues carry onto our lips could create channels of better organised ideas, but that would also easily take our reputation of well-prepared people to be there to a deeper level; there, we felt we converged on chaos;

Actually, we assumed that the live breasts, tremulous by the effect of the stretched arms and the projected chest as if it had a spring, the joined knees squashing little pieces of soil on the ground, the buttocks apart as wings, and the minimal twists caused by the folds of an elastic body, between occasional objects of common, domestic use, that were there just for us; we who were now a centre caused by the centre of the silver body, of red reflections, swaying before us; we were captured by our own mental trap, used to not truly existing as a body; and there was no way to convince us that we could after all reach a better understanding of what a body is; as in street fights we witness without getting involved, we could not turn our backs, look away, but also, as usually happens in those circumstances, we do not allow ourselves to feel the quiver to leave our caves; we were apathetic and not ecstatic; that body was similar to ours and so we presumed that it was just an external image in movements that we realised had been meticulously studied, without superfluous gestures, and that embarrassed us, diminished us and successively made us recognise its existence;

The exposed body gained a universal dimension that we resisted celebrating; when it lifted its head, pointing it to the ceiling, the heavy breathing, in distress, made some of the margins and limits that defined it faint, separating it from us, the observers; the temperature exhaled evened out the temperature in the venue; we focused on the challenge that imposed the place of centre on us, flexible; we were sovereign in our limits and did not qualify that exposure as courage, or what it might bring to us; we preferred negotiating if there was beauty, beauty fitting the idea of beauty, transforming any opportunity of understanding of the established intimacy amongst the participants into mutual aggression; which, in turn, made us attack each other through mortifying comparisons; it was the way we found of positioning ourselves away from what, through the heat, appealed to us, seeing the concrete and physical experience of a vibrant body giving itself, even wishing that it disappeared without leaving a trace; one of us even whispered “...an animal”, as if to convince us that the fine film of our clothes was an imposed artifice, whose origins had been lost in the memory of times; however, quickly thrown in, it failed to free us from, an apparently irreversible, cowardly modesty;

Whoever brought in the question of exploitation did not understand that our eyes were too excited, cloudy to the end, since we had not decided yet if looking is a way of touching and feeling; we rubbed our disquiet hands, but they were, in this case, useless; we let them fall; they did not have any purpose; we watched, undecided, if it was us that had become naked; we had looked at each other in an attempt to still recognise ourselves after all we had seen; we were worried about knowing if what we were asked was to see the world collapse and if there was a way of  forgiving our failure to conceive how a body in action could promise redemption and establish hope of other futures outside of that place; but nothing changed: we had learnt that everything that had fallen into our hands was to be worked on, but, in fact, what we kept in our eyes, was work of another nature; it was a mission; that instead of supporting us in revising our certainties, just confirmed the oldest enmity towards a transgressive body;

We thought we had left unscathed, ignoring that a body like ours has other ways to learn from the experience another body offers; for inhabiting a body results in much more than is apparent in obvious resistances; when it just combines the will and the fragile awareness of itself, it loses the capacity of bringing to light the true recognition of the, very subtly, perceived transformations by our organs; this opportunity, if looked upon as such, would be favourable for us to submit ourselves to the blows inflicted in our daily lives, according to our wishes to change, as could be later seen; yes, only when time runs its course can we tell when a body is transformed into a kaleidoscope of sensations, not easily captured immediately, is a living, combative reality.

2022