Original work by Paula Garcia
RAW
This is an extract. The full piece is 4'48".
This work collages the sounds of “RAW”, a March 2020 performance which involves two cars literally crashing into each other, head on. One was driven by the artist, the other by a professional stunt man.
Exploring issues related to visible and invisible forces and the experience of violent action on and in the body, this project plays part in the artist's “NOISE BODY” series, to which insecurity, uncertainty and risk are integral. The staging and act of this collision created multiple symbolic developments in the artist's practice: the relationship between human action and forces external to it, the fragility of the body image as a record, or as an element of reframing.
The artist confirmed their own embodied act of listening: “For me this edition is about more than the order of the performance (preparation, acceleration, crash). This is more about my mental state, is more about the overlapping of thoughts, fear, excitement, all kinds of feelings that I relived while editing the piece.”
These call to mind author Andrew Murphie’s notes on Delueze and the brain. “Deleuze thinks that “Montage is in thought “the intellectual process” itself, or that which, under the shock, thinks the shock.” The shock is a “totally physiological sensation,” with a “set of harmonics acting on the cortex which gives rise to thought.” At the same time, there “is as much thought in the body as there is shock and violence in the brain. There is an equal amount of feeling in both of them.”