We Always Carry Our Body
Sophie Dupont
(2016)
Since her first performance in 2010, Sophie Dupont has used her body as an instrument and premise for an existential and poetic investigation of what it means to be human. In her ritualized and strictly choreographed works, the artist’s background in dance and painting can clearly be sensed. Her performative work is often physically and mentally demanding, and based on entities like weight, balance and mass, just as central issues in painting, like the figure-ground relationship or abstraction and figuration, are brought into play. Dupont’s performative practice is built around simple, but physically and mentally demanding action rituals. Based on basic actions like balance, breath and movement she creates intense, meditative situations where the body is used as a tool and prerequisite for an exploration of the mind and the fundamental existential questions.
In the performance 'We Always Carry Our Body', Sophie Dupont wanders for among people, carrying over her brass fragments, models of her own body, like human size Mexican ex-votos and milagros, before being placed on the ground, one by one, by people from the public in order to shape an ultramarine blue imprint. Combining gestures of addition and subtraction, elevation and pressure, transposition and transformation, this performance plays with all the possibilities and sense of verticality: from the body “inking” on the ground and soil, to body elevation by elements removal. From votive procession to the discovered corpse, the body either melts into its imprints or reappears under the substituting images, a transfer operation is verified: from physical body to its symbolic models, from their weights to their imprints. Imprints whose color and process recall those of Yves Klein's Anthropométries de l’époque bleu, played for the first time in 1960 on the famous blue IKB comprising ultramarine n. 1311.