“Bodies do not simply take their places in the world. They are not simply situated in, or located in, particular environments. Rather ‘environments’ and ‘bodies’ are intra-actively co-constituted.”
(Barad, 2007, p. 170).
Ocells al Cap (Birds in the Head in Catalan) is a group of international women performance artists who develop intuitive and telepathic forms of communication in group works. They are based in Catalonia (Spain).
The group came together for the first time in 2014, when Denys Blacker was invited by Marta Vergonyós (La Bonne, Womens’ Cultural Centre, Barcelona) to collaborate with the Fundació Antoni Tàpies (Barcelona) for Otras Maneras – an exhibition about the work of American artist Allan Kaprow curated by Soledad Gutierrez. They chose to make a re-interpretation of Kaprow’s happening The Birds, which they titled Ocells al Cap and they invited a group of women artists to take part. The group improvisation was made in the middle of the Gavarres forest in Madremanya (Girona) in 2014 and a presentation of the documentation was shown at the Fundació Tàpies.
From then on the group continued to meet as Ocells al Cap at the International residencies programmed as part of FEM International Meeting of Women Performance Artists directed by Denys Blacker. In 2014, an investigative proposal was put forward by Blacker as part of her doctoral research Interconnection, Synchronicity and Consciousness in Improvised Performance Art Practices.
The group began to explore the possibilities of a (syn)aesthetic re-entanglement of all the senses including those that might reach beyond the body and that would include the possibility of accessing sensed information from others or the environment, as in synchronicity or telepathy.
This sense of intra-connection was gradually articulated as an unbounded group consciousness that Blacker termed vincular mind describing it as ‘an elastic sinuous bond that allows for individuals in all their distinctness to move together, think together, feel together – to sense and make sense’. The vincular, as that which joins or links, is a metaphor for the psychic threads by which we might be joined, mind-to-mind and for the way we can strengthen those connections to allow for information to flow as telepathy.
The group continue to work together in residencies and workshops and in public presentations of the work. For more information and bookings: info@gresolart.com
ARTISTS
Anna Subirana
Clara Garí
Ayako Zushi
Harriet Plewis PhD
Mar Ximenis
“Response-ability is that cultivation through which we render each other capable, that cultivation of the capacity to respond. Response-ability is not something you have toward some kind of demand made on you by the world or by an ethical system or by a political commitment. Response-ability is not something that you just respond to, as if it’s there already. Rather, it’s the cultivation of the capacity of response in the context of living and dying in worlds for which one is for, with others. So, I think of response-ability as irreducibly collective and to-be-made. In some really deep ways, that which is not yet, but may yet be. It is a kind of luring, desiring, making-with.”
(Haraway and Kenney, 2015)
Ocells al Cap 