Intimate Estrangement:

“We are still able to taste the past and we've already licked the future - we are in the only reality there is - that very transition. This year you can quit being straight. Losing the form in the unknown. Cruising, dissolving and loving in darkness. Reorienting.”

Rafał Pierzyński (PL)
makes performances to create sensual spaces for shared experiences and exchanges based on different ways of touching. His work embodies the spaces in between and highlights interrelations to inspire sustainable, post-anthropocentric, inclusive orientations.

1. What work are you presenting?
RP: 'Touching: In time' is a treatment-performance drawing from different moments of my artistic practice and bringing them together in time, into the present context. It is an experiment. It is a continuation of the performance series 'Touching' that focuses on touching as a continuous communication process and mode of being, constitutive to the realities we live in and our bodies. Possibly, also asking what is touching in the pandemic moment and how our lives depends on living with each other and the environment?

2. What is your personal approach to your art works?
RP: It's usually very low budget works fueled by some kind of urgency. I keep it very intuitive, spontaneous. In that I try to create space for reflected, shared experiences. I want to practice being sensitive and vulnerable and queer together. Always in close proximity with other performers, inspired by meeting people. Now, with Jazmin we just met, never performed together and the power of this meeting will be what makes the performance alive for me.

3. What is alien to you?
RP: I use alienation in my works to change the perspective and see we all are already cyborgs, disorders, and queers with nature. Highlighting diversity as source of strenght. To be alien for me is to return to the strange bodymind embedded in its environment to humiliate and deconstruct the patriarchal, masculine, anthropocentric, streight, conservative, religious, colonial ideas of norm, and get surpiresed, discover more instead. also have to think about projections we cast on what's strange and the foreign, fear, and sense of separation. Encoutering a strange could be an invitation to listen, learn, and accept the unknown instead.

4. How do you change perspective?
RP: I turn around, look, listen, come closer, take distance, let go, trust, I ask, I educate myself. I lie down, put my legs on the wall, and feel the blood rushing to my head. I do collages. I trust my experience and acknowledge others's without fear, knowing that we are different. I think about the process of under_standing, exercising of standing somewhere else and as other without losing your orientation.

In the times of global confinement and collapse, Rafał Pierzynski's work takes a whole new dimension. Based in Zürich, the performer and collage artist explores touching as a primordial modality of being in the world, a vector that transcends the separation between the body and the mind, technology and nature. It is essential to love, care, and the deconstruction of the naturality of our representations of our bodies. For Pierzyński, touching is even fundamental to our survival.

In the treatment-performance ‘Touching: In time’ Pierzyński reimagines ecology based on the expanded idea of touching and being in touch. The performance is an affirmation of more careful ways of living with each other and the environment. It shines the light on the abilities of the bodymind to connect, presenting them as powerful technologies for healing, growth and repairation. What is touching in crisis? What kind of stories we tell and intimacies do we embody if the future is now? Everything we know we know from our skin. Dissolving, carefully downloading and uploading. We are cyborgs by nature and we are together.

©dis- order