The world of immaterial and common hands

This is an experiment on hands performativities. In how they perceive the world and how the world perceives them. From gestures to functional instructions, the hands embody themselves with performative phrases in diverse narratives that are unveiled by people and produce relationships with objects, people and abstractions. It’s a whole choreographic process which is conducted through visual and language processes that constructs and deconstructs performative events.

The process that I am looking is the mechanical and procedural zone that unveils from a collection of cinema hand gestures and also, from our common everyday life. Situations that are build-up to enhance different perceptions and awareness of how hands structures an invitation, recognition, provocation, intimidation, contemplation, etc.

The filmography of Robert Bresson is one of the main sources for this experiment due to his ritual and minimalistic perspective of how he works with hand gestures. In Bresson’s movies, hand’s movements are constantly deprived of the actor’s intentions of representing something. So, Bresson is interested in emptying the gestures from their representation to enlarge the wider spectrum of how the spectator produces meaning to what is being seen. It is from mechanical actions and thoughtless gestures that Bresson applies his methods to reveal his emotional atmospheres.

In this installation, we do apply the same method by giving very precise instructions that allows you to just affect or being affected by your own hands performativity which can go from the intimate to the public and that belongs to our common material and immaterial world. These gestures can be functional, expressive, tactile, a language medium or engines of sensations.

Concept & Installation Jorge Gonçalves

Exhibition 28 May 2017, Centro Negra, AADK Espanha, Blanca (ES)