Lygia Clark. Rosácea, 1974/75. Proposition interpreted by Gina Ferreira and carried out in collaboration by Ana Vitória Freire with the participation of Márcia Proença, October 5, 2017, Instituto Nise da Silveira. Photo: Denise Adams

Rosácea in the Care as Method Encounter

Gina Ferreira and Ana Vitória¹

Ana Vitória (AV) – Gina, at what moment in her career and in which context did Lygia Clark create Rosácea [Rosette]?

Gina Ferreira (GF) – Rosácea is part of the Relaxação [Relaxation] series created by Lygia Clark in 1974/75 with students from the Sorbonne, Paris.¹

Relaxação belongs to a group of three collective proposals that Lygia Clark created shortly before Estruturação do self [Structuring of the Self], 1976: Baba antropofágica [Anthropophagic Slobber], 1973, Relaxação, 1974/75 and Canibalismo [Cannibalism], 1973. These collective proposals already incorporate concepts that clearly announce the dialectic between the body and the object in that would become central to Estruturação do self. ²

At first we might wonder about the term Relaxação. Only by experience do we understand the appropriateness of the term “relaxation” to refer to this [therapeutic] loosening process – the loss of body unity. ³

AV – In the context in which Rosácea was created, how does Lygia Clark use Relational Objects?

GF – In Rosácea people lie down in a circle with their hands clasped and their feet converging into a point. The participants’ bodies are massaged with small objects of a particular sensoriality (which would later become known as the Relational Objects). Then the group “rests” for a certain time.

The bundles of multiple sensations created by the objects (indefinite sensorial images) end up taking the Gestalt out of the body and it is in the emptiness of the loss of this corporeal unity that emerges the experience of another collective-cosmic body. This collective body is what provides the anchorage so that the bodily ego does not dissolve, establishing the relation between the part (the individual) and the whole (the cosmic).

Fig 1. Lygia Clark. Rosácea, 1974/75. Proposition interpreted by Gina Ferreira and carried out in collaboration by Ana Vitória Freire with the participation of Márcia Proença, October 5, 2017, Instituto Nise da Silveira. Photo: Denise Adams

AV – The mandala symbol incorporates in its form the idea of an encircled content, delimited and protected. Its centripetal force converges peripheral forces toward the center. Rosácea, created by Lygia Clark in the form of a human mandala, embraces the participants’ bodies that will gradually receive and absorb elements of nature contained in the Relational Objects, thus becoming one body. It’s the feet that form the base of this body and not heads rendering them upright. Gina, how do you read Lygia’s choice of placing feet at the center of Rosácea and not heads as the verticalizing axis of the body?

GF – In Estruturação do self, Lygia Clark used to press the participant’s feet to create a sense of uprightness, counteracting the body’s intense loss of Gestalt.

It is this contact that will allow for a return to a vertical structure, preparing the body to stand on its feet and seek greater autonomy in its relationship with the world, thus leaving what would be a regression, a sensation of loss of the body. Plus the head placed to the outside and not to the center of the Rosácea, allows the best contact with the face which is where one begins to initiate touch on the body, drawing its lines and marking its contours, preparing the body to come into contact with the Relational Objects.

 
Fig 3. Lygia Clark. Rosácea, 1974/75. Proposition interpreted by Gina Ferreira and carried out in collaboration by Ana Vitória Freire with the participation of Márcia Proença, October 5, 2017, Instituto Nise da Silveira. Photo: Denise Adams

AV – Based on my experience with Estruturação do Self, a therapy I have been undergoing with Gina Ferreira for more than a year, I have had direct contact with the Relational Objects. The plastic dimension that penetrates my body and its sensorial-conceptual suggestions help me in the enlarging and deepening of my creative perspective. This is a true solitary experience. But the presence of Gina and her “maternagem” [mothering], as Lygia did, assures, by the bond of trust that we are building, that the anguish of crossing and the contact with the “fantasmática” [phantasmatic) revealed in parts of my body will be conducted in safety. ⁴ In addition to the “proof of the real” of the stone in my hand, there is also what the psychiatrist Dr. Nise da Silveira called the “affective catalyst,” the one next to us, nurturing our progress. ⁵

Gina drawing on your experience and the reports heard over the years of researching/practicing this work, how does Rosácea affect a collective experience and in what ways do the Relational Objects act when they are co-experienced together?

GF – Relational objects are used on every participant’s body but the experience is, a priori, individual. The objects will, yes, sensitize the body that is preparing itself to absorb them. It is via the sensations that these objects cause when they are incorporated, that the body becomes more fluid and the collective body emerges.

Relational Objects are not always immediately incorporated. For this to happen depends on giving oneself over, an introjection. It is an experience that is not always easy and it happens with time.

Rosácea is not of the same order of experience as Estruturação do self particularly on this point, that is, of time. In Estruturação do self the experience deepens, precisely because it is individual and also by the bond that is intensifying with the therapist that is at one’s side. This takes time to transform itself into a deeper process.

In Rosácea it is the clasped hands and conjoined feet that provide an anchor, a contour to the group. This is what allows people to play with the fluidity of the sensations that cross them. Thus, this body that is there, almost dissolving into sensations, is rediscovered in this collective body.

Fig 4. Lygia Clark. Rosácea, 1974/75. Proposition interpreted by Gina Ferreira and carried out in collaboration by Ana Vitória Freire with the participation of Márcia Proença, October 5, 2017, Instituto Nise da Silveira. Photo: Denise Adams

AV – Gina’s invitation to perform Rosácea in the space that hosts her Art, Body and Sensibility project at the Museu de Imagens do Inconsciente [Museum of Images of the Unconscious] has given me the opportunity to experience in another dimension the sensoriality implied in the Clarkian proposition, in the sense of being on the other side of the one who cares for and nurtures, listens and manipulates the objects in function of the well-being of the other, it is another order of the experience of this work.

Gina, how does Care as Method # 2, fit into your project – Art, Body and Sensitivity – and why did you choose Rosácea as a proposition for this encounter?

GF – Rosácea was proposed in the Hall of Mirrors [T.N. A space part of the Instituto Municipal Nise da Silveira] for the Care as a Method encounter as a more ample space for a group, but the Art, Body and Sensibility project is actually carried out in another room entirely, more suitable to the one-on-one work of Estruturação do Self. The project also aims to create other alternatives for bodily works or sensitization, not always linked to the work of Lygia Clark. In this sense, I welcome in this space, within this project, other creative ways of reintegrating the fragmented self of people in severe psychic suffering.

I understand Care as Method as an attempt to unite diverse projects that operate in the in-between of art and clinical practices, seeking common traits that bring together diverse groups working with the same goal: caring for the other.

Fig 5. Lygia Clark. Rosácea, 1974/75. Proposition interpreted by Gina Ferreira and carried out in collaboration by Ana Vitória Freire with the participation of Márcia Proença, October 5, 2017, Instituto Nise da Silveira. Photo: Denise Adams

 

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Ana Vitória Freire
Ana is a dancer and choreographer from Bahia. She has a PhD in Performing Arts from UNIRIO focusing on body performance. She coordinates the Postgraduate Course in Body Preparation for the Performing Arts of the FAV (since 2010) and is an academic professor at the School of Angel Vianna (since 2001). She is an award-winning choreographer (APCA-1997, MAMBEMBE-1998 and RIO DANÇA-1999). For 18 years she has been developing and deepening her artistic-pedagogical research of creation drawing on memory and autobiography, supported by Performance Studies. Her investigative system – (Re) Affective Learning – explores the interweaving between life, art, and poetic-performative action. A theme she elaborated in her PhD thesis and soon to be published in book form.

Gina Ferreira
Gina is a psychologist and currently a doctoral candidate in social psychology at the University of Barcelona. She worked with Nise da Silveira, as technical coordinator of Casa das Palmeiras for five years and interned with psychiatrist R.D.Laing in London at the Therapeutic Community of Mayfield Road in 1980, where she began to dedicate herself to studying clinical psychosis. She implemented the first therapeutic residency for psychotics at the Ministry of Health. She studied with Lygia Clark, specifically her work/method Estruturação do self and is authorized by the artist to use her method. She is a professor in the School of Mental Health of the Ministry of Health and at Angel Vianna’s Dance School.
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¹ For more information on Clark’s practice and this body of work in particular see Christine Macel, “Lygia Clark: At the Border of Art”, “Lygia Clark: The Abandonment of Art”, 1948-1988 (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2014). Also available online in three parts on MoMA’s website (for first part and access to subsequent links: http://post.at.moma.org/content_items/1005-part-1-lygia-clark-at-the-border-of-art [Accessed 05/24/2018]

² For a timeline on the artist’s biography and work see Lygia Clark’s official website http://www.lygiaclark.org.br/biografiaING.asp On the dialectic between body and object see Guy Brett, “Lygia Clark: In Search of the Body”, in: Art in America. Vol. 82, no. 7 (Julho, 1994): 56-63, 108. Available online http://www.luhringaugustine.com/attachment/en/556d89b2cfaf3421548b4568/Press/5880fdab8cdb50ce377aa1ca [Accessed 5/24/2018]

³ [Editor’s Note E.N.: In Paris Clark underwent analysis with French psychoanalyst Pierre Fédida. However, her method drew more directly from the relaxation techniques developed by Russian-French psychoanalyst Michel Sapir. Here the proposal is not “to relax” per se, but rather “relaxation” as a kind of deep listening to the body where “[t]he psychoanalyst-relaxator via his/her inductions, verbal, tactile or otherwise, allows the subject to listen to the sensations that will arise in him/her, put them into words and make connections with his/her story.” See https://www.cairn.info/revue-de-psychotherapie-psychanalytique-de-groupe-2007-1-page-93.htm#pa10].

⁴ The terms “maternagem” [mothering] and “fantasmática” [phantasmatic i.e. fantasies and ghosts] were used by Lygia Clark in her proposals. Gina, Ferreira. ed. Memória do Corpo – Glossário de casos clínicos de Lygia Clark. Available at the libraries of the Museum of the Images of the Unconscious and the Faculty of choreographer/dancer Angel Vianna, Rio de Janeiro. [E. N. For an in-depth essay and discussion on these and other key elements in Clark’s work see Suely Rolnik, “Molding a Contemporary Soul: The Empty-Full of Lygia Clark,” in: Carvajal, Rina et al, The Experimental Exercise of Freedom: Lygia Clark, Gego, Mathias Goeritz, Hélio Oiticia and Mira Schendel (Los Angeles: The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2000). Available online http://www.caosmose.net/suelyrolnik/pdf/molding%20_john_nadine.pdf [Accessed May 28th, 2018]

⁵ Luis Carlos Mello, Nise da Silveira: Caminhos de uma psiquiatria rebelde (Rio de Janeiro: Automática Edições, 2015) 23. [E. N. The psychiatrist Dr. Nise da Silveira pioneered occupational art therapy workshops for schizophrenic patients in the 1940s working with the artist Almir Mavignier and accompanied by the tour de force art critic Mário Pedrosa at the then Dom Pedro II psychiatric hospital in the northern suburbs of Rio de Janeiro (now Instituto Municipal Nise da Silveira where the Care as Method Rosácea encounter took place). Nise stressed the importance of an affective environment and particularly the role of those working with patients as key to how affect can be a catalyst for the curative process].