Primordial Space-Time

Following Marcus' comment on primates and discussions with Dorothy about the intention to create a 'primordial space-time' as one of the states for the work, I am dwelling on some recent writing by Elizabeth Grosz on the relationship between the history of culture and evolutionary nature and how this gives a perspective on some of Borges writings. For a history of culture cannot be conceived outside of or autonomous from nature. Evolutionary nature produces all environments and all bodies that are sustained in and by those environments. Grosz claims, 'it is nature that requires and accomplishes culture, but nature conceived as richly open in possibilities rather than rigidly determined in its outcomes' (2006, p187). She goes on to describe the primordial moment of the artistic impulse as a making of one's body other than what it is: 'One we can see in the products of culture - its technological, political and scientific achievements - the exteriorization of this primitive artist's impulse, the directing outward of this primordial body art' (p.188) How do I make my body other than what it is? For, following Spinoza, we do not know what a body can do. This is a choreographic question I propose we address in one of the first workshops and that the building of our babel comes from this primordial space-time. In The Nothingmess of Personality Borges describes an 'unintelligible cacophony persisting in time and wearing out space' (, p.5), that 'the self does not exist' and 'my body is a phenomenon among others'. So from 'somebody to nobody', 'I am like everyone else'.

Grosz, Elizabeth 'Naked' in The Prosthetic Impulse: From a Posthuman Present to a Biocultural Future, edited by Marquard Smith and Joanne Morra (MIT 2006, pp187-202).

Borges, Jorge Luis, 'The Nothingness of Personality' in The Total Library Non-Fiction 1922-1986. Penguin 1999, pp3-9.