SONIA GUGGISBERG

The body has "folds".

Sonia has developed a series of designs called “fold bodies”. Not just folds in a body that looks at itself from the outside, a body not mine, an object-body, an image-body. The folds in Sonia's work are internal and external, born in the heart and overflowing the pores of the epidermis. On the contrary, the disturbances, motivations and triggers of the surroundings invade the body's contour and transform its current state, demanding a new posture.

Some drawings from this series that I saw before the workshop show these folds, the material of the body.

Sonia Guggisberg, drawing from the bodies with folds series.

Different from the drawings in this workshop, it was the inclusion of this material inside a kind of membrane, bringing a cellular aesthetic to these folds. They also bring a certain pulverization of the individual to the collective and vice versa. This body that is mine and at the same time is not. The membrane as a binding and exchange channel. The control I have over my instrument and the lack of control imposed on a cell that lives in a physically - and metaphorically larger space. Sonia associated the word “air” with her last drawing. The cell breathes in incessant exchanges with air.

Sonia Guggisberg Art

air

Sonia Guggisberg, drawing 2 made at the 5. Body and Art Workshop (July 15, 2021)

Sonia participated in the fifth body and art workshop of this project, held on July 15, 2021. The object Sonia chose to draw in the first blind drawing we made was the cloth to clean her glasses. In this very choice, a priority already expressed: the visual representation of reality. The look as a preponderant method of perception.

“ There is no hand to draw on paper and with the other to hold the frame to look at the object”, Sonia said at the time of the second drawing, in which the activity was, with a small paper frame in her hands, to draw a fragment of the first drawing . This feeling of estrangement, of having to rebalance the body with all its senses in the face of an unscheduled situation, is precisely one of the purposes of this workshop's method. Body-mind trainings like Buto and Aikido, for example, operate in this register. The strangeness and even the malaise are triggers for the sharpening of the perception and, consequently, of the reaction.

The third part of the workshop brings an experience of shapes through movement, in which we repeat the trace or path of drawing n. 2 on supports other than paper, starting with the air and ending with the heart, which in a way represents an incorporation of the path taken. Here, holding the paper or cleaning the eyeglasses no longer makes sense. The body moves in space, the path takes place inside and outside the skin's limits. Sonia gave herself to this exercise, which, without any instructions for it, she performed entirely with her eyes closed.

Sonia Guggisberg, drawing 3 made at the 5. Body and Art Workshop (July 15, 2021)

Sonia's third drawing, which would be a kind of record in traces of her previous experience, integrates the estrangement experienced during the workshop. The clear and safe path of the contours is fragmented with the inclusion of a rectangle or frame that would be a kind of magnifying glass or telescope through which one perceives something that is not seen with the naked eye.