Martina De Dominicis

atente explores touch as a form of manifesting what goes unseen but yet may affect by revisiting the Medieval and invoking its devotional powers. The three performers delve into the personal and collective memory of touch perception and images of touch. They spin a poetic thread across personal biographies, personal dance archives and medieval corporealities and cosmologies reverberating from their skins.

The Medieval Time, an apparent “in-between” time that seems static and suspended, is used as a lens to look at the present. Letting time move in multiple directions, allowing the imaginary and the evident coexist in all what the opaque has to offer. While the past persists in our corporeal imagination, we are haunted by the nostalgia for a future that disappears as we approach it. Maybe the devotion to tactile knowledge and to what the latent teaches us to attend could become a way of navigating the present and its problem. Practicing a state that resembles the mystic and the loving, becomes a means of navigating this spacetime.

In Latente touch becomes a sense to be worshipped and to produce worship. It becomes a performative meditation and a central question to this intimate latent dance that wants to reclaim the capability to grasp (with) our bodies as if it was something about to be lost. The eyes, the skin, the voice, the dance become a tactile organ that gives access to an array of yearning bodies and ghostly presences manifesting in the encounter between the performers and the audience.