#9 Noise Body – Paula Garcia

One of the conceptual objectives of the performance #9 Noise Body is to put the notion of a stable body in crisis by subjecting it to conflict, destabilizing it through sonic intersections, and thereby promoting a “noise body” — unstable, in process, transforming. Throughout my artistic journey, I have been creating a series of performances where I cover my entire body with neodymium magnets fixed onto a custom iron frame. Meanwhile, collaborators cover the magnetized body with pieces of industrial iron and hurl nails until my body disappears under this industrial debris. In this context, the concept of “Noise Body” points to a radical corporeality defined by the intersection of at least three factors: precariousness, uncertainty, and risk. The magnets in my work serve to discuss the concept of forces, not only the invisible subjective kind but also the more overt social forces that work to consolidate a power system that ends up shaping things like bodies, feelings, subjectivities, and truths. As brought by Jonathan Crary in his book Terra Arrasada, where he posits that the existence of the internet and social networks everywhere “maximize the unquestionable priority of taking, possessing, coveting, resenting, envying—all priorities that carry forward the deterioration of a world that, operating incessantly and devoid of the possibilities of renewal or recovery, suffocates in its own heat in its own waste.” (CRARY, 2023, p. 14). In the performative experience of Noise Body, I worked with dismantled bodies, in collapse. Ultimately, what I propose is a performative use of my body, in confrontation with amplified sound, as a material support in which forms of conflict are inscribed. Thus, the work titled #9 (from the Noise Body series), which I performed for five days over about thirty hours at the Southbank Centre in London in 2023, continues to explore elements of this series that deepen interactions between the body and sound technology. In this piece, I use devices attached to my body that generate and modify sounds in response to its movements and the surrounding environment.