«My body remains the enduring reality». The mind is a muscle (1967). Yvonne Rainer

«What’s private is public and the body is the stage. (…) it’s a space of their own, a space of freedom, it’s also a political instrument, yet mundane, biopolitic».
CIELO (not published, 2013). David G. Torres

«If public life has reached a state in which thought is
being turned inescapably into a commodity and language into celebration of the commodity, the attempt to trace
the sources of this degradation must refuse obedience
to the current linguistic and intellectual demands before
it is rendered entirely futile by the consequence of those demands for world history».
Dialectic of Enlightenment Philosophical Fragments (1944). Theodor Adorno and Max Horkeimer

Joan Morey’s (Mallorca, 1972) trajectory gathers a number of works about the language, the space and the power that mainly use the performance as a means of artistic expression and the body (the performer) as an object of ventriloquism. LANGUAGE implies a linguistic turn apropos of previous works since it leaves aside some usual procedures in his way of working, like the use of voice or text to develop his projects.

The performance LANGUAGE adopts a series of methodological rules based on ‘’No Manifesto’’ (1956) by the American choreographer, dancer and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer, whose objective was to revolutionize dance and reduce it to its essential elements. A restriction to basic components is applied now to
Joan Morey’s artistic practice who, in an exercise of ‘’emptying of content’’, presents a close-up view of one of the fundamental pillars of a performance’s language: the body.

LANGUAGE articulates itself through the performer’s body which it uses as matter or a communication channel, intensifying its presence by means of a direct link with the sculptural classicism (whose absolute primacy is the representation of the naked human body) and with post-modern dancing (which emphasizes the use of improvisation over technique, form and content). The ‘’body’’ shows itself inactive inside the space of the gallery, transformed here in some kind of diorama more suited to museums of natural history.

The performance LANGUAGE is orchestrated through very close collaboration with Baal Dansa, formed by Catalina Carrasco and Gaspar Morey, who not only are responsible for executing the piece but of presenting for the first time in Mallorca this new procedure of auto-imposed work. A methodology that moves the artist to the edge of the action and leads both performer and spectator to confront the space
of representation of the body with the idea of a ‘’body-machine which becomes an effective force when, at the same time, it is both productive body and subjected body.

LANGUAGE uses as a leitmotiv a unique aesthetic canon from the Greco-Roman sculptural classicism: the contrapposto or chiasmo. This form of representation designates the harmonic opposition of the different body parts in the human figure, which provides some movement and contributes to breaking the law of frontality. Contrapposto was used in sculpture to give it a sensation of movement, exactly the opposite of the base of this project, which counts with dance professionals to whom mobility is denied at the moment of executing the action. From the intersection of disciplines, from such contradictions and the collaborative experimentation starts a machinery that glimpses at the topologies of the body from the depths of occidental history.

Parallel to this, LANGUAGE takes as a starting point the radio conference ‘’The utopian body’’ (1966), in which Michel Foucault offers an analysis of the body that parts from the contrast between the implacable and familiar presence of our own body and the transformed body, the ‘’body without a body’’, that is the principal actor in all the utopias.

Like this, and broadly speaking, LANGUAGE (Prologue) reopens a debate about the conception of the contemporary body and its presence in the figurative arts, amongst them the performance, inviting the spectator to delve into the comprehension of the utopian experience of the body be it the simple presence thereof, its material place in space, its physical construction and morphology, its conscience of itself or of a provoked poetical (un)production.