Title: Walking along LygiaPape’s DIVISOR (The Divider)
By Grupo TRANSVIAÇÕES
Our proposal is to walk along Ligya Pape’s Divisor (1968). I, Belidson Dias, have been using successfully this Brazilian 60’s “neoconcrete” art over the last 20 years of my teaching.
Lygia Pape's "Divider" or just “divider” is a work of art that explores the relations of a collective action/art, where people can experiment performatic structures and manifestations without the artist presence since the participants will become the artist themselves. The divider's structure is so simple that anyone can repeat it. "The performance consists of the use of a white fabric with 30 m2, full of slits arranged in a regular way that show only the heads, involving the whole body of the participant. Each participant will occupy their space, new participants will join and the choreographic meeting of individual movements, in a same body, will form the Divisor. The fabric rests on the shoulders, isolating from the view of the participants the improvised choreography they perform. Whoever is inside sees only the heads of others and the folds in the fabric, combined with moving shadows. From the outside, one glimpses an ocean of people in transit: individualities that affirm themselves by the prominence of faces, but whose walk results from a collective negotiation."
For Pape, this kind of proposition would be ideologically generous, a public art in which the public can participate. The “Divider” can connect the participants, forming one body with many heads. To move that body needs negotiation, collective action, materializing a live experience of otherness. How to divide spaces and movements with others? What political spaces are we capable of constructing nowadays? Is it possible to think those issues in the pedagogical spaces that we inhabit as teachers and students?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=llSs3S43yzM (1968)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pipCLdQS7to
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoxLgPD71fg
https://www.facebook.com/jornalistaslivres/videos/1927604510880392/
http://lygiapape.org.br/news/topicos/expo/page/3/
Please see images of my teaching Practice (with variations) at UBC. There are plenty of information regarding this work on the web.
https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2017/lygia-pape
in 2017, this show was organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York collaboration with Projeto Lygia Pape.