I give you my heart. Nicole Michalla
“I give you my heart” is an artistic project, a performance in various supports and more to come, a series of reflections upon individual bodies and a social one (which is for me, the same). It is a reconfiguration of my sensorial maps, my body cartography. It is an encounter with others, human or not, visible to the eye or not. It is a constant attempt to translate the invisible, to embody it in transmutation and exchange to give it a voice.
It is that, but also a living paradigm. The opportunity to dedicate and focalize my time into the sharpening of my senses, the process of decolonization of the ways I perceive what I sense, provided with a territory where to the encounter with spaces and subjects that were not present before in my practice and thus, my life. It revealed the possibility to work both on my own and in collaboration with others, through means I never considered possible. This all allowed to extend my artistic practice into my daily life – now not cleaved from each other.
Based and inspired by “The intruder” by Jean-Luc Nancy, it is a life project which deals with love in all its facets as a process of fraternal encounter, dialog and exchange with an-other. It touches empathy and its opposite: the lack of sensitivity, the automatism in the eye, the ears, the impermeability of the skin. It places questions on affection and its agents, their apparent invisible power to reveal or hide, to fool the gaze. It promotes the listening practice as a tool to visualize, supporting the translation of the invisible, the unheard. A sensual body is then a technology supporting the e-lucid-ation of darkened voices. Silence by artists John Cage and Otacílio Melgaço, both in their theoretical and practical approach to it, facilitated me with the tools to reveal the materiality of sound, its movement and affection both inside and outside the limits of the skin. Sound represents that invisibility which touches, disturbs or helps and listening, the means to unfold it.
