From the Navel to the Spine (Studies on Squats III), 2022
Live performance, 30 minutes
From the Navel to the Spine was a participatory, relaxed performance presented by the artist in collaboration with students from NABA Milan. Using the posture of the squat, the performance explores how a fragile body of resistance can be collectively formed within crip time. Hundreds of bodies came, squatted, and left, making space for new protesters. At the same time, the most vulnerable were carried inside the squatting circle.
The umbrella project Studies on Squats examines the bodily posture of the squat as a performative archive of cultural, affective, and political data. Using the “Asian squat” as a central mode, the project approaches posture as an embodied information system through which histories of migration, illness, resilience, and collective survival circulate. The project investigates how certain gestures become legible, misread, or rendered invisible within public infrastructures and broader data cultures. Field research, relational movement practices, and choreographic mapping are woven together to reveal the squat as a tactic of care, endurance, humor, and resistance — a posture that unsettles normative expectations around how bodies should appear in public space.