Body Languages 1: Woodchopping

Body Languages 1 is a session of collective woodchopping. We enter into the realms of gendered and conflicting desires, extractive zones and competition. When we take pleasure in this violent taming, what languages do our bodies speak? What do we (re)produce? Together, we work (things) out, we make a dance between admiration and revulsion, criticality and affirmation, destroy and denaturalise identification up to exhaustion, we think through shaky hands, we are shaping to take shape. Or, in the words of personal trainer, bodybuilder, stunt woman and artist Heather Cassils, “You have to break things down, to build things up.” The workshop ends with a meal and a screening of the video work “I was told I chop wood like a ballet dancer” by the artist Freja Bäckman. Poster/Cover by Ida Jonsson and Simon Saarinen.