#131 Carmen Pazos "A personal experience of culture, space, language and time"

2025

Solo performance at 2M3 - Brussels, Belgium

Curated by Maarten Van Mieghem

Culture is alive. It lives in us. Culture is a mutable microorganism in constant flux, absorbing, adapting, evolving, exchanging, growing in our individual and collective minds, reshaped each time it is transmitted. A microorganism that feeds off community and creativity. Without people to be its host, there is no culture. The absence of cognition to interpret it and of bodies carrying out its rituals means inevitable perish. Languages die without speakers. Artifacts lose their meaning when those who define their context are not there, relegated to nothing but pieces of matter.

Culture has evolved with us through millennia, just like the flu. Many attribute the culture to the land, as if it was tied to it. In reality, if everybody disappeared from that land and a new set of people were put there, they’ll bring the culture from where they came. Like an implant of a colony of gut bacteria.

Material factors like weather conditions, terrain, history or conflicts affect the mutations of these microorganisms. The entire population of France and Japan could be swapped tomorrow, and, at least momentarily, France would become Japan and vice versa. Just until those material factors begin the mutation process.

Culture has so many shapes, and they are all in a state of constant transformation. Elastic, expanding, contracting. Twisting. Sometimes going extinct, when all the carrying hosts disappear. 

For some hosts, other variants are regarded as a threat. They fear the mutations. A mutation that would alter the hierarchy. Every little interaction between members carrying the same variant creates a micro shift. Every interaction between members carrying different variants is an earthquake. Such massive shock, it develops into a new form. One richer and more complex, however threatening for those attached to the current form of their microorganisms, which often is regarded as immovable and pure.

Beware, collisions between hosts carrying different microorganisms outside of a controlled environment may result in symbiosis or in conflict.