Text - Claim Your Superior Bone Ingrid Eggen, Admir Batlak

I had the pleasure to write a text for the artists Ingrid Eggen and Admir Batlaks exhibition ‘Claim Your Superior Bone’, that opened yesterday at No Place in Oslo. It is about matter, collectivity and dancing, a fictive conversation between Kasia Wolinska & Frida Sandström, Carl Gustav Jung, Robert Graves, Lykke Li, Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, Antonin Artaud, Silvia Federici and me.

Claim your superior bone Moa: What? Frida & Kasia : There are many, explore them, discover your body and bring it to its fullest potential alongside other bodies. Carl Gustav: A rhythmically quivering system. Moa: Fucking and dancing. Carl Gustav: Dancing is always connected with creation. Robert: In the beginning, Eurynome, the Godess of All Things, rose naked from Chaos, divided the sea from the sky and danced lonely upon its waves. Frida & Kasia: Through the introduction of the wave, the regime of the straight line, with its temporal linearity, is broken. The wave sparks from within the body and flows further into the peripheries, transgressing the boundaries of the body and reaching the outside, returning with new information and perspectives. Robert: She danced towards the south, and the wind set in motion behind her seemed something new and apart with which to begin a work of creation. Wheeling about, she caught hold of this north wind, rubbed it between her hands, and behold! the great serpent Ophion! Moa: Why did she dance? Robert: She danced to warm herself, wildly and more wildly until Ophion grown lustful, coiled about those divine limbs and was moved to couple with her. Moa: And then she turned into a dove and laid the Universal Egg? Robert: Yes, from where all things that exist tumbled, her children: sun, moon, planets, stars, the earth with its mountains and rives, its trees, herbs and living creatures. Frida & Kasia: It is through the wave, a new school of dance is envisioned. In its seemingly dispersed form, lacking the institutional ground and constrictions of traditionally regulated systems of knowing, it tries to leave its trace, sparking soft transformation. The new school of dance is an underscore for moving together, for the constitution of the social sphere in which we become many. Lykke Li: I was a dancer all along. Gilles: You never walk alone. Even the devil is the lord of flies. Frida & Kasia: For [Isadora] Duncan, dance was to be shared, and it was to become the language of revolution, conveyed through the radiating bodies of individuals composing an assembly. The dancer was envisioned a force enabling radical redefinitions of modern times—a model for movement away from the cruel optimization of labouring bodies and toward a felt politics that would, ideally, enable a future for all. Silvia: Mechanization, the turning of the body into a machine, has been one of capitalism’s most relentless pursuits! Gilles: You see, we don’t know what a body is capable of, we prattle on about the soul and the mind and we don't know what a body can do. Antonin: All writing is filth Gilles: We must believe in the body but as in the germ of life, the seed which splits open the paving stones, which has been preserved and lives on in the holy shroud or the mummy's bandages, and which bears witness to life, in this world as it is. Antonin: Believe in the flesh Frida & Kasia: What is shared between bodies is vibrant, yet intangible. It is a vast space of possible communication and relations that haven’t yet been experienced or envisioned. To feel your own movement is essential to the radiant communication that connects you with others. Silvia: In essence, the act of dancing is an exploration and invention of what a body can do: of its capacities, its languages, its articulations of the strivings of our being. I have come to believe that there is a philosophy in dancing, for dance mimics the processes by which we relate to the world, connect with other bodies, transform ourselves and the space around us. Matter is not stupid, it is not blind, it is not mechanical, but has its rhythms, has its language, and it is self-activated and self-organizing. Lykke Li: I was a dancer all along. When I trip on my feet. Look at the beat. Gilles: You never walk alone. The self is only a threshold, a door, a becoming between two multiplicities

Bibliography: Kasia Wolinska, Frida Sandström, The Future Body at Work, E-Flux Journal, 2019 Carl Gustav Jung, James L Jarett Nietzsches Zarathustra, Notes of the Seminar given in 1934-1939 Robert Graves, The Greek Myths – The Complete and Definitive Edition, Cpt 1 The Pelasgian Creation Myth, Penguin Books Ltd, 2017 Lykke Li, Dance Dance Dance, Youth Novels, 2008 Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, A thousand Plateaus Capitalism and Schizophrenia, University of Minnesota press, 1987. Originally published 1980 by Les Editions de Minuit, Paris. Gilles Deleuze Cinema II, University of Minnesota Press 1989, https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/13009.Gilles_Deleuze Silvia Federici, In Praise of the Dancing Body, A Beautiful Resistance, 2016