Acid Bodies. Embodied Research (ongoing since 2018)

The documents here are a small selection from the first manifestation that took place in 2019 at ZK/U - Center for Art and Urbanistics, Berlin. As the work continues to evolve, public documents remain limited. If you are interested in knowing more or experiencing the private archive, please feel welcome to write to Euna at: graceeunakim@gmail.com.

ACID BODIES is a critical research frame that grounds Grace Euna Kim’s separate yet interconnected performance, social, and pedagogic practices. Developed during a residency at Frankfurt Lab in 2018, and formulated in fall 2019 at ZK/U,
it is an ongoing experimental hybrid of radical pedagogy, immersive performance, sociopolitical research, and embodied activism, which problematizes the body as a site of individual and collective worldmaking. The work and methods have since evolved through different focuses in tandem with workshops, research labs, and masters courses which have taken place at Weißensee Kunsthochschule (MA Spatial Strategies), Stadttheater Spandau, PAP Berlin, Uferstudios, and Parrhesia: School of Philosophy, among others.

Acid Bodies builds on Euna’s methods and observations from 14 years of devising and choreographing site-specific immersive performances. It is grounded in questions about how ideology is internalized, performed, and spatialized by bodies in space—through psycho-phenomenological meaning forms, intimate interdependencies, and psycho-political economies. Acid Bodies thus immerses participants in speculative, non-verbal investigations that make visible and work through unconscious mediations of ideology, desire, and power—particularly in terms of how consensus and “truth” are negotiated, internalized, normalized, and weaponized (like an acid trip). Who and what colonizes whom, and why?

Through deconstruction and subversion of sense and non-sense, visibility and non-visibility, perception and meaning, structure and anti-structure, “Acid Bodies” explores body, sense, kinetic, energy, temporal, spatial, and perceptual approaches that de- and re-construct social imaginaries, together with the people themselves. These are carefully devised to produce speculative conditions where knowledge can emerge rather than be given or presupposed, and be lived rather than objectified or consumed. Central to this are questions of individual agency and accountability, asking how we can activate our body as a site of resistance, and thereby reinvent social and political consciousness.

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ACID BODIES first manifestation at ZK/U (2019)
Concept/Direction: Grace Euna Kim
Assistant: Tania Turcan
Camera: Marjorie Brunet Plaza, Tania Turcan, Ali Reza Hemat Boland

ABOVE: Short sound excerpt
Still from hidden video camera: Marjorie Brunet Plaza


PARTICIPANT REFLECTIONS


- Roujieh Gharib
“My lovely friend, I want thank you alot for spreading this spirit with us. You are Star of this project, not just a guide, I’m so happy cause of your invetation and your acceptance. I’ve tried to do my best but I hope that I could give more and let spirit and positive energy flow higher through breaking the ristrictions down. So proud of being a part of this groub.

Today there is an addition to my personality, my strategy how I deal with the external world, plus a realising fregility of awareness and knowledge. You know humanity when I wake up I repeat alot of habits, taking in the same way but today something’s different, I’m alive on those threads, between my words spelling out I feel a strange liquid of comments changing the old face we used to be. I can hold Berlin with smile on my face, it’s really n’t heavy like always, it’s becoming so light flighing with wind movements. I’m a human, I can be that legendary air, stronger than any time befor, a child playing out without any kind of fear breaking the scene,

Fear as a threat :
If you get fucked, you will get AIDS. If you smoke, you’ll get cancer.
If you breathe, you will breathe polluted air. If you speak, you will lose your job.
If you walk, you will be the victim of a criminal act.
If you think, anxiety will wear you out. If you suspect, it will lead you crazy.
If you feel, you’ll feel lonely. To take a deep breath, it is necessary to feel debilitated. Stands, you have to learn how it is falling. To provoke, you have to learn how defeat is. We have to know that life is like this, and that we will fall and rise again.

Keep on love’n you earth without wearing any mask to adapt those social scripts.

Actions and Reactions. “To do means you can do. Not to react means that you are weak enouph to this level that you can’t”. Excuses to our unlimited greed.

I can be my self, I could be any thing that I want unless I can be my self, also my shadow. New visions of me, read apdate. And not harm full in compare with my last life. I share my shadows with creatures then I disown from. To be a reflection inside a bottom of a Mirror. Perhaps I find a tale of a dictator’s story about long-short ways: “Don’t you think you’re safe from me .. Nothing escapes the text”. One the way to übermensch.

Sipping the fear of your palm, the iris reached its limit as a gateway. Transparent as a point of view, sharp as the angle of vision, so light that it is difficult for a whole mankind to carry you, silent to the extent that your friendship widens as far as range. Here on a vibrating rope under my feet, I fly to the middle.”




- Naomi N.
“How sure can you be of the emotions and the messages you transmit by the use of your silent body? How do you give meaning to every movement without programming yourself? How do you use your body when you know you are being watched?

With about 10 years of experience in theatre, I have acquired mindblowing insights about my own body language in those two days. The workshop felt like next level theatre training and meditation at the same time. The exercises forced me to deal with inner blockages that we sometimes prefer to ignore. Releasing these could be confronting yet very deliberating. Grace Euna Kim leads the workshop with a particular kindness and great attention to details. Silence is an important ingredient to the atmosphere. It allows to slow down and focus on the body. In her way, Grace Euna Kim creates a safe space where in a few hours time, you feel comfortable in sharing emotions with people who were still strangers when you had walked in earlier that day. And that is also the beauty of these two days. Acid Bodies is a marvellous enriching experience thanks to the techniques, the magical atmosphere, the great energy that emerges in short time, and the beautiful encounters with Grace Euna Kim and the other participants.”




- Pat Maslowska
“The adventure that I open the door to, was the most unconventional from all of my lifetime experiences, yet its primal aim was to expose the rawest of the essence, hidden deeply under the thick layers of conventional, coded gestures, that, what I later learnt with the full intuitive understanding, reflect a coded, imprisoned state of mind.

What was the most special about the Acid Bodies was that it was breaking the patterns. It started by building trust, empathy and intimacy – the most significant pillars of each relationship. I felt it throughout the whole communication with Euna, from the very first email I received from her I felt like she’s genuinely interested in what I have to say, who am I and what brings me here - that she wanted to discovery by inviting me to share my most crucial (co)existential questions I’ve been developing and bearing since the beginning of my conscious life. Here I am – writing about the panopticon that symbolises how I feel regarding the system. Those questions from Euna made me remind myself things that were asleep, alive but a little numbed, now again waken and hungry. I didn’t know what to expect, so I had no chance to overgrow with the expectations, to put one of the social masks. What happened next – I would never be able to guess before I actually had an indescribable luck to experience.

On the long list of lessons that I gained throughout working with and learning from Euna, the one about taking action is the one that has the biggest potential to bring us the future back. And what I hope for the worldwide spread societies, is that they started this new decade with the strong and sustainable realisation that out future requires depetrification and there is no one but each of us that can make that happen.”




- Anne-Sophie Debrabant
“Intense, poetic, apocalyptic. I am in gratitude to have been able to participate in a project of such emotional, physical and psychological strength. It made me realize that questioning habits were essential to finding one’s place. I became aware of the sovereign strength of the body, that it was capable of regaining its freedom in the face of alienation. Listening to the richness of this silent and profound language that governs us and makes us live. This openness made me change the way I communicate with my body and with others. To become fully aware of what I experience every day in my body of domination and oppression but also of the passion that animates me.”