ERIKA HARRSCH

Bodymaps is a multimedia performance, with video -animation and music scored for soprano, cello, and electronics. A collaboration of visual artist Erika Harrsch, composer Paola Prestini, and cellist Jeffrey Zeigler (former member of the Kronos Quartet), featuring soprano Hila Plitmann, Bodymaps explores the video-animations as they visually correspond to the music of both the cello and the human voice.

The moving images and musical composition were designed together, down to the minutest detail, in a creative process that reveals the evocative landscape of the body in its delicate voyage through Harrsch’s visual realm. The work blends selections from her paintings, drawings, photography, and video series, including Hanging, Traps, Alter-Eros, and Eros-Thanatos. Bodymaps is a personal portrait exploring the plurality of certain human experiences, showing the body as both structure and dwelling place for consciousness—which transforms, mutates, adapts, and recognizes itself as vulnerable. The foundation of the apparent body is life itself, converted into a cartographic surface on which scars, experiences, and stories are traced. The stories are based on several found texts. A blind canary (depicted with an eye in its beak): “A canary, blinded by lightning, had to be taught to bathe and where to find its seed and water. Not being able to recognize daylight, the bird would often start singing at midnight.” (Margaret G. Zackowitz on Patrick Lambert, an amateur bird medic.)

Feet, tired from journeys: “We stand, feet to earth, with our hands liberated, enabling us to look at the sky.” The arm, translated into a metaphoric butterfly wing, allows the imagination to escape: “The body in death. The wingspan of this butterfly is petite. 3/8 of an inch. The violence that can be done to 3/8 of an inch.” (Neela Vaswani) The human hand, with its power to touch and heal, holds within its palm a visual synthesis of the human experience.

Bodymaps was originally commissioned by VisionIntoArt for the Whitney Live series and premiered in 2007 at the Whitney Museum in New York. It has been performed in diverse venues and festivals, including Sound Res in Italy; Galapagos Art Space, the 21c Liederabend tour, and National Sawdust in Brooklyn; among others. Visual concept and artwork by Erika Harrsch, music by Paola Prestini, motion graphic collaboration by Begoña Lopez and Victor Melton.