Revolution My Body nr. 2

Film (Super 8, color, silent) projected on white paper sheets (screen), each one with a screen printed inscription"your body is my body" and a statement inviting the audience to act upon the screen during the projection. Variable duration. 1976.
Initially titled This is My Body nr. 1.

A series of screen prints and a film. The screen prints are completely white paper sheets with a visually insignificant print of the sentences: YOUR BODY IS MY BODY / MY BODY IS YOUR BODY in a circular symmetrical disposition. The same sentence is repeated in a film, separating the respective shots without any edition. The film This is My Body nr. 1 represents a workers' protest. (...) Finally a statement invites the participants to truly being it by manifesting their bodies on the white paper sheets.

Ernesto de Sousa, "Três 'exposições' na Polónia", Colóquio-Artes, nr. 30, December 1976.

Presented at:
LDK Labirynt gallery, Lublin, October 1976. Part of the collective exhibition with Fernando Calhau and Julião Sarmento.
Centrum Dziekanka, Warsaw, October 1976.
SACOM 1 (1st Week of Contemporary Art Malpartida), Malpartida Creative Center, Vostell Museum, Malpartida de Cáceres, January 1978.
Quinzena do Cinema de Pequeno Formato, Sociedade Nacional de Belas-Artes, Lisbon, December 1979.

Related Texts

Foreword to A Triple Exhibition: Fernando Calhau, Julião Sarmento and Ernesto de Sousa

Ernesto de Sousa, brochure of the exhibition at gallery LDK Labirynt, 1976.read text ↓

The meeting of three experiences, intentions, three different expectations may only be assigned as a game of reductions, that is to say a more or less intelligent path to Death. This complex reducing network cannot identify itself with any kind of annihilation; it does not point to the existential "neant"; on nthe contrary, it points to death, a clear, discreet situation with all its weight of being, something definitive. A cultural situation too, positive and referenciable. We should say even with added rigour : death fills the situation of the one who refers, our common denominators are the corresponding significant realities: the significance, an existential residue. What is substantial in this death? It is the continuation on life. Continuation of life: Let us take as an example, this figure: three, three different aesthetical experiences/human, social, etc. What they can have in common is a destiny, and the only common destiny they can have is Death.

That means something that – in other words holds the whole life, inclusive death. In this case, condition of life. Having conscience of this is maybe the most typical mark of our modernity. A vibrant shade, a light path, a support of eternity.

We meet in this half-shade: modernity. Here shall the ancient virtues be exalted, perceptive and humble because glorious. Here shall be exalted by the modern science of dying, the end of dying, the end of the individual destiny, which will find itself again as destiny tangential to everybody's destiny.

That I come from film and you, and you from painting, it is the same understanding of nothingness as "ostinato rigor" that is leading us.

The reduction to zero of the Ianguage corresponds to a modern fight and as we said, to an existence of rigour. No more symbols, and still less their lyrical echo... Starting from zero we shall point to the signs of a new structure, to which a new sense to Glory, a new Exaltation shall correspond.

In the Portuguese case, this reduction offers a new facet. As a matter of facet, half a century of violent repression led us forcibly to a situation of total negation; we lived, we thought, we acted only against it.

And thus that reduction has among us other claims and strong demands that overvalue it: it is didactic and a methodology and added historical sense correspond to it. In this case, necessity and modernity are blended together; there is no other possible affirmation beyond that or those formulated with start at our zero state. There is no alternative, or there is only an alternative zero.