SILIKON
SILIKON was the new transdisciplinary collaboration by artists Andressa Cantergiani and Alan Egedy. The performance Corpo Estranho ‘Nonbody’ addresses the fragmentation processes of the post-human body and explores how in this scenario the socio-affective and space-time relationships are affected and transformed, as well as subjectivity and desire.
The fictional vortex of Corpo Estranho lies in the journey of two transhumanist characters named Oni & Ini who live on a dystopian planet in the errant and failed attempt to communicate with each other. As N.J Stallhard commented in his article I Want to See you not Through the Machine (2018) using E. M. Forster's science fiction 'Machine Stops' (1909) as an example, every dystopia, carries a utopia behind it. Oni & Ini never meet, but the attempt and desire for the encounter remains endless. There is a melancholy behind these lonely creatures, their half-machine and half-human DNAs has made them part of a dead-end path of incommunicability.
Communication is the door to a broad dialectical discussion about the real x virtual, machine x human, and nature x culture.
Oni & Ini are Cyborgs, as Dona J. Haraway (1991) says in 'A cyborg Manifesto', a cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of the machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. For Haraway contemporary science fiction is 'full of cyborgs - creatures simultaneously animal and machine'. Oni& Ini radically born as cyborgs have their subjectivity fragmented and shattered and lead us to question about what and what is the function of subjectivity, the focus of post-structuralist philosophical studies, for example from Lyotard to Deleuze and Guattari.
Tomaz Tadeu in his text 'We, cyborgs The electric body and the dissolution of the human' says that 'Ironically, it is the processes that are radically transforming the human body that force us to rethink the human "soul". When what is supposedly animate finds itself deeply and radically affected, it is time to ask: what really is the nature of what animates what is animate? It is in the
confrontation with clones, cyborgs and other techno-natural hybrids that the "humanity" of our subjectivity is called into question' and further asks where does the machine begin and the human end or vice versa, and what are these Or again, given the general promiscuity between human and machine, would it not be the case to consider both questions simply meaningless? More than the metaphor, it is the reality of the cyborg, its undeniable presence in our environment ("our"?), that puts the ontology of the human in check. Ironically, the existence of the cyborg does not intimate us to ask about the nature of machines, but, much more dangerously, about the nature of the human: who are we? (TADEU, 2000) It is from the ambiguity of humanizing the machine and making the machine human that Oni & Ini is born and its anguish of incommunicability to bring us the idea that nothing else is pure, we are in the post anthropocene era and hybrid beings are the beings of this era of Humans, Non-humans and Transhumans. So questioning their genealogy is simply pointless, but without absolving us from the responsibility of whom we are and what we are doing to our surroundings. Corpo Estranho is a discussion about how we have become strangers to ourselves to the point of completely losing our identity-self-subjectivity (what is it for anyway?) but beyond a look at ourselves, Corpo Estranho wants to investigate how cyborgs inhabit the planet and what their
evolutionary contribution is without judging subjectivity, as it catapults into dematerialization to emerge a collective of consciously hybrid beings and perhaps so alone. Perhaps only it, loneliness can make a cyborg remember that it is also still somewhat human, and there, dead subjectivity, come back into existence. It is also about this paradigm of subjectivity that Corpo
Estranho hovers.