Touching and being touched. The material of their bodies yield into one another. Giving in, being held. Skin against skin. Fascia against fascia. Blood. Bone against bone. Matter sinking into matter.

Matter Matters is a three hour long durational performance installation, based on three different improvisational movement scores, set in a gallery. It was a part of the research for my MFA research presentation Always becoming, never arriving and was performed in January 2020 as a part of 13 Festivalen at Konstepidemin in Gothenburg.

Performance: Marcella Steen, Alice Suits and Tuva Hildebrand
Concept, choreography, sound/text: Tuva Hildebrand

Can the body transform beyond that which we assume as truth and our familiar perception of the form of matter? Can the body disappear into the material which it is encountering?

“I am not a woman, I am the sensation of my body and that which it encounters. There’s no gaze, no phallic gaze, nor a gaze of my own. I erase that which has been written onto me and re-write myself into the world”.

As an activist I am passionate about understanding the power structure between language, body and experience through movement and somatic language. As a performance maker I am curious in investigating the relationship between object and subject within the power structure giver and receiver. Is it possible to co-exist and not end-gain in a relationship?

This is an ongoing performative practice based in a durational improvisational movement practice, where I explore whether it is possible to be a subject and still be viewed. What is pleasure in it’s intrinsic value? Can we experience our own material and the material we encounter in it’s intrinsic value? What is otherness and what parts of every person cannot exist within the normative codified language we have been taught to communicate within?

Through touch and imagery I repattern neuromuscular pathways in my body and enter a state beyond language. In this state I expose myself to the potential of transforming into something new. Can we find out which values existing through and beyond us that are conditioned and socialized? Where does the self end and the collective start?

Consent and boundaries. Platonic touch.