The first enactment of “Can we touch?” is part of the working process developed throughout the performance workshop “Arte ao Vivo /Live Art”, given by Nadam Guerra at Parque Lage School of Visual Arts. The course was profound and physical: we worked, in the body, the many creative dimensions of the matter through several exercises, practices, and dynamics that sought to overcome the boundaries between art, life, and transformation. It was an intense workshop, indeed. There were moments in which it was necessary to simply skip some classes so that the body could have the time to ruminate and assimilate what, there, we entrusted to the collective.

For at least a year the idea of a relational device like “Can we touch?” had been haunting my thoughts. Its conception is related to the inquietudes produced by several experiences of distance. Physical distance of thousands of kilometers from the ones we want to be close to: how many times did the desire for a physical touch had to be quenched by touching an image on the screen? Paradoxical experiences of space that, out of necessity, made my body sensitive to other layers of presence produced by the mediation of ubiquitous images.

Leaving the territory of the “I” and move toward the “other” is fundamental to transmutate personal inquietudes into artistic experiences that can be exteriorized, shared, and communicated, creating something (un)common. Self-knowledge: if, in the field of performance, the gesture of frontally looking at each other is a well-known practice, would such action have other layers of presence as the stare becomes mediated by screens? What would be the material nature of this image that, projected on the screen, wants to feel? Questionings that were materialized by the enactment of “Can we touch?” at Parque Lage’s Noble Hall.

In this sense, the feedback from the public was quite interesting: many people came closer, observed, went through the experience, and showed a feeling of being provoked, of “having smelled a rat”. And for me, this is enough. “Can we touch?” employs phones, screens, computers, projectors, and wireless networks to provoke more than a technological fascination: its main focus lies on using such technologies to build a technical frame that can bring to the surface the relationships engendered by it. Relationships that are fragile, uncertain, undetermined and, thus, represent an open process of experimentation.