TOCO CON MIS PALABRAS, CON MI PRESENCIA, CON MI SER, CON MI ESENCIA (A la memoria de Neil Marcus)

collaborative action, poetry, video mapping
1er Encuentro “Cuerpos en Periferia/ Creaciones al margen” Caracas, 2022

The title of this work is a quote from a poem by Neil Marcus, an American actor, playwright and poet with dystonia and one of the pioneers in the development of “disability culture”, a revolutionary understanding of disability beyond reduced view of the clinic. It refers to the possibilities that a body has to make contact with another from immobility.

The work responds to an invitation to create body art from marginalized bodies. Using collaboration as ethics and aesthetics, I proposed an action in which my body is powered by other bodies (the rest of the artists participating in the meeting) and in which my body serves as a support for my poetry* and the poetic images that emerged. , with emphasis on the words “margin” and “periphery.” Stripped of clothing and separated from my electric wheelchair, my body expresses itself from nothing more than its subjectivity and, like Marcus, touches the other with words, presence, being and essence.

The poem by Marcus, who died in 2021 at age 67, comes from Cripple Poetics: A Love Story (2008), a poetic correspondence that documents the professional and personal relationship with the German Petra Kuppers, another important artist and art theorist made by radical artists from disability.