Aleks Borys

embodied by land – was made during LABverde Art Immersion Program 2017 in The Amazon/ Brazil
made with Canon Super8 Camera and Kodak Super8 Film
Filmed and Edited by Aleksandra Borys

with financial support from Adam Mickiewicz Institute

The film was made during LABVERDE art+nature+science Residency – Arts Immersion Program in the Amazon/ Brazil. It wishes to represent the sensation of rainforest and how it affects human body. It was a wonderful experience to observe how human body and the environment became each others prolongations.

embodied by land

The physicality of Amazonas is what I miss everyday. My body is longing for the physical state and sensation it experienced back in the rainforest.

For ten days I was exposed to the power and greatness of Amazonas. The experience was overwhelming for my European mind, that could not follow what my body had already understood and begun working with. It took a couple of days until my mind could cope with the physical experience of the senses opening to their fullness, the feeling of the body expanding, losing its boundaries, blurring with the environment.

At first I wanted to produce/create a dance inspired by the experience, by the body was smarter and made me realize that ‘the dance’ started when I arrived in Amazonas, it was my mind that could not process what was already happening. By welcoming and accepting the overwhelming unknown, I started to learn from the environment through the physicality of my body. The physical experience of my senses uniting with uniting with the senses of the Amazon. My body stopped belonging to me, it became part of the environment, it became an elongation of the forest. The fascia that used to define the borders of ‘my body’ connected with fascia of the environment. Entering the network of the forest, my physicality took part in the flow of physicality’s between bodies, beings, tress, water, land, air.

This physical experience is a bottomless source of learning, which I try to come back to every day. It was one of the most profound, overwhelming physical experiences I have ever had.
All of it happened within only 10 days. I cannot even begin to imagine what it is like to be born into a community which has been living in the Amazon for generations, and see/experience/feel what is being done to the rainforest today.