“When Being With becomes Being Within”
This Gentle Moment
by Anna Chwialkowska
23.7.22
How do you meet the heritage of a deceased artist? How can you find possibilities of being with them without ever having met them? How to meet the fine line of meeting them through their artwork without appropriating it or using it to your own benefit?
In his multidisciplinary artwork This Gentle Moment, the choreographer Nitsan Margaliot propels these questions by setting up different grounds in his search for an encounter with the artist Meir Eshel Absalon. During his short life span the installation and video artist Absalon (born 1964 as Meir Eshel in Israel) pursued the vision to reduce individual housing to a necessary minimum. He created six
cellules – something that we may label today as “tiny houses” – shaped around his very personal needs, like a second skin, and planned to be set up in six different global metropolises. Although these cellules invoke an uncanny feeling of prison-like isolation and askesis, Absalon was genuinely interested in the intersection of private space and society – thus the wish to place the capsules into the centers of buzzing cities. Absalon died of HIV at the age of 28 with his vision unfulfilled.
Along three chapters that structure the video This Gentle Moment, we witness the performers Nitsan Margaliot and Eli Cohen practicing “being with” Absalon, passing through the spatial, material and emotional heritage that the artist has left behind.
Departing from two cellular architectonic structures, Nitsan and Eli enact Absalon’s relationship with the space, each one moving in a white cell limiting the possibilities of movement. With the frames of the cells set side by side we see invocations of everyday scenes: dressing, undressing, resting, sleeping, washing. Movements, reduced to a minimum, are only performed out of absolute
necessity.
Provoked by the performers’ heads moving in a regular movement from left to right – looking around, looking out, shifting the gaze – we see the desire of breaking out of these cells arise. As Nitsan and Eli leave the cell behind, they spread the remains of its intimate skin into the space and onto each other. Chapter two begins.
We see them gently leaving imprints of their bodies in the space, writing, re-writing and eventually wiping out the past. We see this gentle moment moving closer as the performers do. The crisp intimacy of their skin that we witnessed in their own cells before is not being replaced – it is augmented. This most basic encounter of two people makes me think of where the skin of our housing meets the outer world, the society we’re in, carefully exploring the degrees of its
porousness.
What is on the other side? How thick is this wall? Can we touch what’s inside? Is this skin we’re inhabiting enough of a shelter? Or is it actually too much?
The feeling of inhabitation rests within the entire piece, even when Chapter 3 calls for a destruction of the cells. However, I refuse to call it a destruction. For me, this is just another embodiment of the space, a closer inspection of what the skin around is made of. The tearing, piercing, wrinkling of the textures of the walls is as careful, joyful and thorough as the encounters between the performers we
saw before.
I think that it is not through reenactment alone that the performers meet Absalon - they constantly stretch the skin of his work, filling it with themselves, their own beings. To me, this becomes particularly visible within the play with shoes. Yes, they step into Absalon’s shoes (black Clarks), but they also step out of them, into their own shoes, into high heels; they stumble, take shaky steps, with one foot, two hands, they turn in circles, beyond time and gender.
What This Gentle Moment shows us is how it feels to inhabit someone else’s living space that is as close to their bodies as their proper skin. Wrapped in this house-skin we may try to move it around and away, giving new forms to it, open it to different intimate encounters with other humans, spaces and beyond. This is when we see “being with” becoming “being within”.