Extinction: Marine Holocaust.
To all animals at Sea.
Nomadic outdoors metaformance
by Jaime/Jaym* del Val
at the open air amphitheatre of the University of the Aegean in Lesvos.
2nd June 2024.
In collaboration with Joan Caronil and the exhibition Ocean’s Soul Reconstitution.
Bodynet-Khorós EU Project – Forum 6
Conception and performance: Jaym* del Val.
Assistance with portable computer, sound, and projections: Anastasios Tsakiliades.
Coordination assistance: Jean-Marc Matos.
Video recording: Joan Caronil.
Video editing: Reverso
A naked body covered in sea trash and amorphous meta-structures moves becoming an alien sea-like creature. Its on-body sensors extend the body to an emergent landscape of formless digital architectures and sounds creating a mysterious and undefined ecology, a metahuman mutation. A denounciation of the biggest destruction ever caused by humans: fishing and the marine holocaust.
……….
A naked body covered in sea trash, fishing nets, and amorphous meta-structures amorphously moves becoming an alien sea-like creature. Its on-body sensors extend the body to an emergent landscape of formless digital architectures and sounds creating a mysterious and undefined ecology. Moving around in unpredictable ways, intra-acting with space and audience, like an alien medusa in a collapsing world, a fugitive night creature that appears and then vanishes, this creature exposes a metahuman mutation away from human centric madness, towards symbiotic ecologies.
Forbidden to humans, the participant chorus of the audience was invited to sign the Human Supremacy Resign form – https://metabody.eu/ontological-therapies-hst/ – before approaching the space and was invited to move around with the performer around the open air theatre space, which is actually reminiscent of the ancient Greek theaters where choruses dances over 2,000 years ago, on the University Hill looking to the sea, whose waves could be heard. The performance is a metaformance in so far as it dissolves traditional audience-spectator divides and involves the unpredictable in multiple layers of the improvisation while implying an extended body that creates a morphing space and multiple levels of sensory and kinetic indeterminacy.
An assistant metaformer was moving around, wearing a body scaffold with the computer, speakers and a small portable projector, an equipment conceived for very mobile performances ourdoors. Initially intended to end up in the sea nearby, with the performer entering the water, and dissolving in it, it ended before this due to unexpected overheating of the small portable projector.
The performance is a collaboration of Jaym* del Val with Joan Caronil and his exhibition at the 3rd MFF based on designs of alien mutating sealife made of sea trash, a tribute to marine life in times of Planetary Holocaust. The structures worn by the performer include sea waste collected by Joan Caronil and the digital designs life-processed by the performer through the sensors on the body are partly based on those made by Joan Caronil for the exhibition, with images of amorphous sealife on changing geometric backgrounds.
The performance is a tribute to sea life and a denounciation of the greatest and most silenced destruction machine ever created by humans: industrial fishing, which annihilates every year over two trillion sentient sea-persons and deforests every year 200 times more seafloor surface than the entire deforestation in land. The way out, besides stopping to eat fish, and animals altogether, is in a deep mutation away from the desensitisation of trash-human bodies, unleashing a new sensitivity for becoming with the world, disappearing as dominant destructive species, reabsorbed in the ebb and flow of becoming, back to the sea, in whose neverending movement life emerged.