Corporeality Manifesto
My last manifesto for a while.
I wrote this manifesto while participating in the manifesto-writing events at the Soil Factory, organized by Johannes Lehmann, Linda Weintraub, and Anna Ialeggio. I have been working for a while to arrive at these words and looking for ways to express these foundational ideas that combine my academic studies, my experience as a mother, and my lifelong search for understanding art-making. I presented a slightly different text at the Soil Factory. Now, a month or so later, I edited it to better affirm the different sexual experiences and the mythical understanding of Mother.
While presenting this text at the Soil Factory, I felt like an elephant in a porcelain shop, and I’ve been investigating my need to defend more subtlety in my own life since then. I’ve arrived at the understanding now of the need to focus on more art-making, both in painting and writing, which I believe means writing fewer manifestos (which might be my primary mode of writing in the last couple of years — always writing to achieve Truth) and more poetry, including academic writing in poetry.
Corporeality Manifesto
Debora Faccion Grodzki
Our body is our first and ultimate reality.
Corpo-Reality. [1]
A mani-festo, a celebration of hands: a text in which I make obvious what I bring with me, what I make, and what I offer.
The only True Knowledge is knowledge of who I am. To manifest is to act through this knowledge.
The first inevitable Truth: We were all born out of a womb.
Remember the placenta.
Before us, there was desire.
A manifesto carries in text the form of knowledge that expresses the desire for the continuation of life. I speak of what I know to be Truth, without the need to prove it. Like the Goddess Mother, I affirm.
Life has a way of working out.
There are already many goddesses. As many as we need to liberate ourselves from coloniality.
Osun. Maria. Mãe Terra. Shakti. Manat. Pele.
We can create Others.
The Goddess of the Soil Factory.
The Goddess of Belly Laughter.
The Goddess of the Fruit Tree.
The Goddess of You Are the Dancing Queen.
I want to remember everything that kept me alive.
Meet the mother who undoes the knot. She, who knows how to be still until the only necessary movement is clear. My grandmother's hands touched all that brought me here.
We need every-Body. No one can be wasted; Every-Body is an artist; we can't afford to lose anyone. The mad turned shaman; the weak, a reference for all we need to give up; the lazy, our hero.
Like Bartleby, I'd prefer not to. Unlike him, after I refuse the formula, I consider my only choice. [2]
The only True choice is the one that doesn't paralyze me. The one that flows through my breasts. It generates the energy. Desire again. It is emergent in the body:
The gut, the heart, the goosebumps, the lightness on the legs, the furtive smile.
The body is not only political/biopolitical, it doesn't simply keep the score, it isn't merely the home of the spirit. Yet, "The Spirit refuses to conceive the spirit without a body." We cannot be disembodied. [3]
The body is.
resourceful
lovable
apaixonado
malleable
humorous
pure fun
alive.
Before it decomposes, I compose, add layers, compost, use, and reuse. The reality of the body is the present moment that transits all the consequences of the past into the future. Its Nature is trans: it is constant transformation. The consciousness that reaches the muscle forms it in stretch or relaxation.
In corporeality, performance doesn’t exist. The brain plasticity recycles the microplastics. The revolution has been happening. Some never stopped planting the food forest.
We were animals.
We were cannibals.
We were humans.
We were gods.
We were scientists.
And we were cyborgs.
We are natives.
We are immigrants.
We are anthropologists.
We are artists.
We nourish the Body with matter and meaning; we dream and build with Others.
History is written in the Body-. Art reads it in each -Movement. It is Corpo-Reality.
[1] The word in Portuguese that precedes this manifesto is “corporeidade,” which I encountered in Leda Maria Martin’s work, making a difference between North American performance and the work of Brazilian artists as “corporeidade.”
[2] Here I’m referencing Gilles Deleuze “Bartleby; or, The Formula,” which appears in “Essays Critical and Clinical,” trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997, pp. 68-90.
[3] Andrade, Oswald de. "Manifesto Antropófago." Revista de Antropofagia, no. 1, 1928, pp. 3-7.
