Este corpo que me ocupa (2008)

(…) The work Este corpo que me ocupa closes, in a certain way, a cycle started eleven years before with “I am sitting in a room…” where João Fiadeiro devoted himself – through a series of interfaces he promoted (creation projects, investigation ateliers, workshops) and through the theoretical and practical platform Real Time Composition offered – to experiment and systematize new way of collaboration, composition and artistic creation. Este corpo que me ocupa positions itself as a performance-theses, where Fiadeiro, in collaboration with Paula Caspão, attempts to synthesize, in a simple as possible equation, the questions he raised as an artist and as an researcher.

From the original dossier:
“If I had to summarise my “modus operandi” in a single word, that which motivates and defines me as an artist, I would say that I function and work with the "remains". The "remains" is what is left behind, that which was forgotten (for there is no perfect crime). The "remains" is what creates "emptiness". And it is the proof of the absence of presence. Or, more precisely, it is the presence of an absence. It is in the "remains" that we find the evidence that provides the beginning for the impossible task of re-building the world, once and again. I am attracted to this idea of knowing that something was here before me and that what remained, resisted.
The remaining is also what lies between the body and “the presence of the other in the body”, a permanent flight towards things that are not yet, towards things that might be(come). And this is what I am concerned about: how to show what is not there. How to work with such volatile a material as emptiness? How to present the "in-between" of things? And even more difficult, how to perform it?”

(taken from the program notes of the SOLOS | ENACTMENTS performance series 2014, translation Vito Evola)

“Este corpo que me ocupa has been called a “metapiece” by João Fiadeiro, meaning that his choreographic modus operandi is the topic and the material for this solo piece. During the first part of the piece, short texts are video projected onto the back wall of the stage space, providing the audience with fragments of stories and histories about the performance venue and its surroundings, which Fiadeiro carefully researches in each location in which he performs the piece. The effect of this approximately ten-minute section on the audience is a gradual familiarization with the performance venue, and a sensitizing for the kind of augmented perception of space- time that characterizes Fiadeiro’s Composition in Real Time method. In Fiadeiro’s words, the text fragments “zoom in and out of years and centuries of people’s lives in these particular spaces and places”.

Our choice to employ consecutive zoom in and zoom out camera movements for the entire first half of this animated infographic film embodies Fiadeiro’s analogy mentioned above. However, we also intended to physically provoke a sensation of traveling through his conceptual and imaginative universe.

The first camera movement travels from the floor of the Atelier Real to the ceiling, and takes us to a view from above where we can see the entire structure of the piece in the form of nine video thumbnails organized in a circle. Both the camera movement and the visualization of the scenic structure correspond to Fiadeiro’s perception of time as circular, not linear, as presented in detail in the film about his graphic models.”

The text above is an excerpt from our article:
Jürgens, S., Henriques, F. and Fernandes, C. (2016) Re-Constructing the Choreographic Studio of João Fiadeiro through Animated infographic films, PARtake: The Journal of Performance as Research, Issue 1, Volume 1.

Read on here:
scholar.colorado.edu/partake/vol1/iss1/3/