The Body Keeps the Score: Blink / Yawn Registry. 2020
Articulo 123, Mexico City
Layered in time, the body is on camera, then on paper, then real life: choreography was always something between drawing and cartography. In the case of “The Body Keeps the Score: Blink / Yawn Registry”, the video and the video on paper is the score (the seconds between blinks and yawns, the quantity of blinks and yawns), as blinking makes a rhythm of itself, its own shape and form. Sometimes we blink faster and wider, other times we blink slow because we are drowsy, or we yawn when we feel drowsy. As repetition warps their functions, blinks and yawns abstract themselves toward semiotic notation: blink as number, as punch-in, as time signature, as musical note; yawn as bass, as footnote, as iteration, as point of reference.
The videos focus, through their simplicity, on these systems of choreography that play out to no end, unrecognized, unaccounted for, and yet they mark the body with a rhythm inextricable from the happenstance of living.
Blinks and yawns are isolated for their involuntary design as mechanisms that check us into continuity; they beget their own record of annotation as a happening without intention. Through this lens, time itself is recast as a measurement relative only to the dryness of the eyeball and sequential blinking, or the length of activity that results in fatigue and sequential yawning. The otherwise untraceable history of yawns or blinks becomes imprint on the physio-memory of the body. “The Body Keeps the Score” seeks to amplify this. In a pre-choreographic return to annotation, blinks yield scribbles and yawns yield curves, marking up the body as it imperceptibly bears the score, replete with unseen dance.
