proximity trials

temporary communities __intimacy __uprooting

1. Installation / one-to-one interactive performance, 2020, Showroom MAMA, Rotterdam,
during the program Other ways of watching together curated by Neverland Cinema
in collaboration with Eszter Nagy and Pille-Riin Vihtre

0. intimacy: noun
UK / in.ti.me.si / US / in.te.me.si/ __a situation in which you have a close friendship or a relationship with someone: [usually plural] things that are said or done only by people who have a close relationship with each other.
Synonyms: friendly, convivially, hospitality, inseparability, human touch, warmth, welcoming.

2. How does closeness changes in absence of physical presence, what this entails on the concept of proximity? Is the co-presence in the space that allows closeness? The place where contact, encounter and touch can happen. Where the self and the other meet, within context. We are placed locally, but we receive input from all over the world, thanks to devices that are becoming more and more a part of us, changing our perceptions and our capacities, subtracting us, perhaps, a part of the materiality of the bodies we are and subjecting places to increasing virtualisation and displacement. We experience relationships in presence or absence of physicality. In the interconnected and globalised context, proximity is problematised and virtuality seems an alternative to it. This generates new reflections: How do our relationships with nearness evolve? What is the measure of closeness? What is intimacy in a new inhabited place? Who are the intimates in a nomadic world? How can we experience closeness? Is place still one of the elements that characterise intimacy? Staying silent hand-in-hand, eating together, having the possibility to be physically close.