Corporeal Realities – Chiara Giardi

Corporeal realities is a drawing performance which wanders in time and space. It is the artist’s journey of self-reflection. It explores the performer’s identity through the limits/contours of her own body. Identity, as the performance, is represented as a process. It never ends and it always changes through time and space. It moves, it re- writes itself, it reacts differently to the surroundings. It crosses other’s lives and it vanishes with time as the chalk traces on the floor. It is the representation of the mark one leaves on people and places. Where does the body end? And where does the external world start? What norms regulate the borders and interaction of those two spaces?

“As a consequence of being in the mode of becoming, and in always living with the constitutive possibility of becoming otherwise, the body is that which can occupy the norm in myriad ways, exceed the norm, rework the norm, and expose realities to which we thought we were confined as open to transformation”

Judith Butler, “The Question of Social Transformation” in Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 217

Corporeal realities is a journey of appropriation and empowerment. As passerby and spectator, you are invited to take chalk, join the artist and start drawing your contours to explore your body in its dialogue with the other performers, the audience and the city.