The performance considers the realising of existence as elementally constituted in-relation-with, a worldview that reveals slivers of connectedness shared by matter and movement. The wind instructs us in the act of moving, passing through and carrying with, in defiance of all barriers. In the breeze and the hurricane, it reveals the delicacy of touch and the force of radicality. In the studio, sounds of Californian winds, rough and slight, recorded by the artist’s partner Claudio, meet the winds of New Delhi—summoned by another participant in the workshop, and both are held within the breath and gestures of João’s body. Inspired by the philosophy of spiral time, and the traditions of whirling as acts of divine or inter-dimensional encounters in Sufism and Brazilian cultural practices, João moves to the tandem of air—as wind, as breath, as the matter that resides in-between bodies, while drawing on the ground and walls, through eruptive mark-making that foregrounds connectedness. In the act of ecstatic whirling, the head is transformed from the centre of reason to a pivot for balancing the body as it turns repeatedly, approaching the notion of ‘ori’ a Yoruba word which understands the head as a source for the communion of intuition, spirit and body.

with Cláudio Bueno | Sound by Kaldi Moss

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