OSSU
OSSU is an ethnographic diary of my relationship with a stone. It is a diary shared from a distance. The beginning of a research.
During the pandemic I raised many questions about materiality, temporality, the human condition and its vunerability towards non-human forces (like viruses, fungi, natural disasters, the internet...) This project is situated precisely within that circumstance, time and context.
Trying to understand the relations between human, phenomenological and geological bodies, but also in order to recover the mobility torpid by the pandemic - to be able to walk, to breathe, to sunbathe, to leave home - I travelled to the Azores, from where I brought back a set of volcanic stones, dark and porous, that I still keep with me today. When I returned to Lisbon I began to wonder why I had brought these stones with me. I thought: "these stones are a mountain, which in turn is an island, in the Atlantic. Why did I make them go through a suitcase, through an airport, a plane hold, make them ascend to an altitude of over 35,000 feet, and then descend them to a new continent, a new city and of course, finally, to my home?"
I thought it would be nice to do something with these rocks. But I had had enough of working alone, talking to myself, always in a closed circuit. I decided to invite the artist, researcher and musician Joana Sá, whom I barely knew, to keep one of the stones with her. I would keep the other.
At that date I couldn't imagine that this dialogue would make the invisible imaginary of sound flourish abundantly in me, with which I would develop a performance ("Aurora", 2020) and with which I would start a research journey on material ecologies and post-humanism, whose first ideas can be found in this text ("OSSU", 2020).
For some time Joana and I shared correspondence, and a kind of constant resonance gave rise to this text.
This text is therefore a diary but also a continued action, motion, movement. It is a performative diary of that resonance and that imaginary.
Concept, Writing an Research
Sara Vieira Marques
Resonance
Joana Sá
Editorial support
Rita Natálio
Publisher
Forum Dança
Forum Dança, Lisbon
may 2020
may 2020
*A version of this text was published in PEGADA (link for full publication- in portuguese), an independent publication that brought together written works by dance and performance artists about their practices. (This text is written in Portuguese and not published in English)