The Art Corner: Rewilding the Body with Farah Azrak
A deeper connection with our bodies is a revolutionary act in this society, and Syrian artist Farah Azrak tells us why.
There is a painting by William Blake in which the mathematician Isaac Newton, is depicted crouched on a rock, drawing with his compass on a piece of paper that is on the floor. He is naked, and actually sitting on an incredibly beautiful piece of rock, full of moss and colours. But Newton is not there, he is in his mind, completely out of his body and his surroundings.
I discovered this painting a few days ago when I attended a recent course about the cosmos at Kosmica Institute. This painting reminded me of the great amnesia our logic-dominated world is facing: we have lost the connection to our bodies and reside mostly in our heads, something that is convenient to perpetuate a system that is patriarchal and capitalist.
Yet, the more people I speak to, the more I realise that for most of us, a returned connection to our bodies is a return home.
The artist I met this month at the Art Corner has dedicated the last decade of her life to researching and experimenting with the relationship we have with our bodies. Farah Azrak is from Damascus, Syria, but she has been living in Lebanon for the last 9 years. When I speak to her she is in a room of arches that looks almost like an ancient wine cellar. “I’ve been living in Lebanon for nine years now, but still feel very rootless. Like I don’t have a country to root in,” she tells me. She moved to Canada when she was 16, then lived in London for university, then the Netherlands, and returned to Lebanon as a war began in her home country.
“The experience of displacement has always been my story, since a young age. And I’ve always been in search of an anchor,” she says, “ and I found it in the body, that became the ground for my rooting system.” Farah has been working for 10 years with body practices and movement, as an artist, performer, somatic movement practitioner and educator.
“The experience of displacement has always been my story”
Her journey to the body began, of all places, in fashion. She tells me that working in fashion made her realise the close relationship that our bodies have with our clothes, and everything they represent. “it is one of the most intimate relationships our body has, on a daily basis. The closest thing to our body is the textile that covers all of its reverberations: socio-economic, cultural, identity..” she says, adding that our bodies have transformed into something that is more aesthetic, objectified and individualised since the start of fashion a hundred years ago.
Working for a big fashion brand she also discovered the close relationship between fashion and capitalism. “It is the pinnacle of it,” she says firmly, “and of exploitation on so many levels: environmentally, but also in terms of resources of every kind. Natural, production, psychological, you name it!”. As her country of birth was going into a war, and she was in London in a completely different reality, she began to ask the question: “what am I doing with my body?”, and her path began to change.
“I realised that the only way to heal traumas that are lived repetitively, in childhood, or in war, the only place to be is the body; to activate its capacity to heal and fully voice itself.” She continues, “I’ve been actively working for more than ten years to deconstruct my own experience, to redefine and rewild it.” These thoughts take me back to the book The Body Keeps The Score by Besser Van Der Kolk, whose primary theory is that our bodies carry the traumas we live. In a world where our bodies are used as machines for work and producing a workforce then, rewilding our relationship with the body is a powerful act of revolution. “Yes!! agrees Farah “It is the radical practice.”
The binaries in Western society have offered us two main stories when it comes to the body: men ascend from the body, and women are controlled through their bodies. This has created a huge division that also perpetuates violent patriarchal narratives and a complete lack of emotional and bodily awareness. The body is the place where we can connect more strongly to our emotions, and a detachment from it spills into socio-political issues.
“The body is used as an object for purposes of control, power, and oppression,” Farah agrees, “or as a means to eradicate culture. And this is not only in our current history, it goes back hundreds of years.” She tells me that she believes that capitalism and patriarchy shape the way in which we view the body, “How can we rebuild this? How can we understand the body’s history, and reconfigure its relationship to ourselves, others, and the environment?” Farah says, telling me these are the questions that guide her work.
We begin speaking of Syria again, her country of origin, she tells me that there is a huge transgenerational pain and trauma coming, “In a country that’s been torn and tormented, oppressed and raped, and, and completely destroyed culturally and socially, where all of the fabrics have been ripped apart,” this means an accumulation of suffering, and therefore a need for the layers to be stripped, and she believes that recovering the relationship with the body is one of the ways to do this.
We can keep being in our minds, but ultimately we must go back to our bodies if we are willing to try to connect with ourselves and others. Farah tells me about her technique of Emerging Body, “I always allow the body to emerge. This a prep that I do in my practice. Just allowing myself to sit and deeply listen to my body, actively. And listening is not only hearing” she points out “it is actually hearing and then actively following the desire and need of the body at that moment, following an expression, which could even simply be just resting.” Through this practice she allows the body to deposit what is present at the moment, and welcome what emerges. This can be a powerful healing practice for people who have gone through trauma, to re-introduce new ways of feeling and hearing the world, through a different voice.
She tells me that a lot of her work is also about the voice, but the way I interpret it is not the voice coming from our vocal cords, but our whole body as a voice. Farah tells me that her voice emerged five years ago, and that until then, she had been silent.
As a writer, I cannot interpret the voice as something that only comes out of my mouth: a voice is a place in this world, it is a position we take with our bodies, a reclaiming of space. A voice is not only used for screaming, but for existing in a liberated way.
But what of different experiences with the voice? I ask. We allow ourselves to explore binaries at this moment, even though in our practices we both try to avoid this and integrate fluidity. Farah’s work has brought her to observe that “the relationship of women to the voice, and to the body is completely different historically than that of men. All of the spiritual and philosophical aspirations of men are actually to leave the body, to ascend. But then when the practices that are more rooted in the feminine are more introspective, about going into the body. I have observed this, and they don’t negate each other. “I reflect on the action of balancing the two to create harmony. We must move forward from an unbalanced binary into a harmonious relationship, without stacking things one on top of the other, but by understanding the nuances needed. So, how do we move forward from this separation?
Again, Farah takes the body as an example: “If you look at our own somatic experience, you need both to move forward. We cannot move without lifting, and heaving up the body. And then we cannot move forward without opening up. This is the basic action of locomotion, it has both dimensions”
