YOUR/MY BODY

YOUR/MY BODY centers the body as a vehicle for empathy. In an age where our lives are increasingly digital, the gap with our own bodily experience is growing. YOUR/MY BODY counters this: a return to the feeling, tangible, breathing body. Not anti-technological, but a necessary counterpart that activates closeness, empathy, and humanity.

YOUR/MY BODY explores how the body can generate empathy: through breath, gaze, skin, and voice, bodily signals are shared and collective resonance is generated. As humans, we naturally tend to connect with those similar to us and to approach the unknown with caution. Now that most people are guided by their smartphones, the gap between people seems to be widening. The digital revolution we find ourselves in isn’t the cause, but it does contribute to an acceleration of polarization.

I want to investigate whether we can reconnect with each other when we feel our bodies more. Can I, through performance, help people feel their bodies more? Can I break through the boundaries that prevent people from seeing each other as equals, while simultaneously allowing others to exist in their own uniqueness? In a time when social media connects us but also reduces our identity to a brand, when individualistic identification is increasingly strong, I want to seek a balance: how can our need for autonomy be reconciled with our need for touch, for connection? What happens when we confront the cultural and social coding of the body, the commodification, the conditioning of gender and power? And how can we deal with the barriers of language, the shame that blocks touch, the fear of vulnerability, and the technological means that reduce bodies to data and images?

I live in an apartment building in Laeken where many cultures converge. Here, not everything has to be shared in the same way; each bubble has its own culture and relationship to physicality. How can my project relate to my neighbors through different forms of dialogue? I hope to share the question of how the body speaks for itself and how it can interact with others with care.