Intuition is a Muscle: Interview with Bárbara Foulkes

Let’s start in the middle. A rope hugging the body at the navel and tightening it upwards; an upside-down U. I’m suspended in the air, hanging from a harness. I roll from side to side, turning my hips in order to change direction. My fingertips skim the floor, leaving grease and collecting grime. I’m in one of Bárbara Foulkes’s dance courses; I feel boisterous and joyful.

“During the pandemic, there was no point in my hanging,” Bárbara says. “Everything was already suspended; it wasn’t what I needed.” We are sitting on the floor of her house—a house with a modernist air, elevated on cliffs of volcanic rock, contained by towering brick walls, at the bottom of a serpentine alley—having coffee. Her little dog licks my face effusively (interspecies teasing) and, for a second, I think the dog’s toy is a dildo. There are some drawings mounted on the wall. They are silhouettes of bodies traced with simple, thick lines. In several of the drawings, the figures repeat the same movement.

Bárbara Foulkes: When I’m working on an action, I always carry a notebook. While I work, I note things down and draw things; I put together a world that lies between drawing what I just finished doing and drawing what I can’t do or don’t want to do yet. I’m still inquiring into these drawings [pointing to those on the wall]; they’re diagrams, perhaps, or suggestions of movements. I’m interested in inviting people to think about their body’s movement.

From repetition a lovely paradox arises: it generates both meaning and absurdity. Insofar as there’s repetition, things take on meaning; they become ritual. Children play the same game over and over gain; the bread always turns into the body of Christ. And yet when one repeats-repeats-repeats the same word, it falls apart, rendered into meaningless sound. Bárbara’s work lies on that edge: rooted, like an old tree, but nevertheless light. Her work is both ritualistic and weightless.

BF: In my practice, action comes before thought. I think after acting, not before; I let the action be the “based on” and, in this way, I don’t write or draw on the body, but rather based on the body. For example, in dance they tell you what to dance and you dance it. But what if you dance first and then say what you danced?

An article published in the scientific journal Nature[1] explains that the brain, at a neurological level, knows several seconds before the conscious mind when some part of the body is going to move. That is, within the synaptic recesses of the mind, your hand knows before you do that it will move in search of that cup of coffee. I imagine Bárbara connected to a primordial corporeal state, a kind of fleshy Arcadia in which her body overwhelms her mind. A resistance to the exhausting cephalocentrism of everyday life. I offer my theory to her. She clarifies that what she’s describing isn’t for leaving the mind behind; it’s simply for reversing the order of the products in order to enhance the result. In other words: what if we learned to listen to the body before the mind? What powers, intelligence, and cunning would we find there? I think of my mother, who, at 65, says that she has finally learned to trust her instincts. I mention this to Bárbara and she says to me, “Of course, intuition isn’t magic; it’s a way of knowing. Intuition is a muscle.”

BF: I think the body is so seated, so fragile, so quiet. Don’t scratch anything, don’t fall down, just sit there! The body’s like this: shhhh, shush shush. There’s a whole power of the body that’s not culturally elaborated. My practice is to be in an action, to inhabit it, and then to see what’s happened. It’s not “I want to break this thing,” but rather “I want to see how it breaks, I want to see what happens when I put myself in that situation.”

In the piece Insistir insistir insistir (“Insist Insist Insist”), a collaboration with Abraham Cruzvillegas and Andrés García Nestitla, presented for the first time in 2017, Bárbara encircled a graceful and unbalanced nest of everyday objects, suspended in the middle of a large room. One observes her tied to the sculpture with a harness—an umbilical cord—that allows her to manipulate and undo the nest using the force of her body. Each presentation of the piece is unique.

BF: I find strategies so that the pieces are never closed. That is, I want them to be action structures that are open to being modified. I like to think that the pieces fall into the spaces—they’re not a pre-made package—so that they fall and are transformed. I also think in terms of curiosity, as children do: “Where does it come from? What is it?”

Curiosity is different from exploration; the latter invokes flags and bearded men. Curiosity, on the other hand, is a matter of jumping into the unknown, a medicine for combatting the symptoms of a world turned towards goals and results. In this sense, the work is even-handed; a meditation on sufficiency. What happens is enough. It wouldn’t have to be more or less. We’ll see what happens, together. Bárbara will be just as interested as you will be.

Is the chair going to fall? For the piece Sin casa (“Homeless”), Bárbara collaborated with visual artist Adriana Riquer in order to explore the uses—all except the intended ones—of certain objects. Its point of departure was a performance intervened-on using material instabilities (for example, objects perched on bottles) that invited mayhem and accident. Bárbara creates containers of potential: structures within which you can improvise and rethink power relations (read: actions) regarding objects.

Although she didn’t know it at the time, Bárbara began her artistic training in gardening. She tells me about her high school: a program that seems to be half pedagogical avant-garde, half scheme for procuring free adolescent workers. In the Botanical Garden in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Bárbara and her companions pruned trees, shoveled fences, and drew flowers.

BF: I got closer to nature and learned how spaces work in relation to what’s alive. Landscaping teaches you to think in circles: when leaves fall, when plants bloom, the distance between roots, and how a seed moves from one place to another. Nature is choreography.

In 2019 she presented ¿Cómo respira una escultura? (“How Does a Sculpture Breathe”), a piece made up of many bodies suspended at different heights and at changing angles: a living grid. During the performance, Bárbara distributed PVC pipes among the dancers, in such a way that they would connect and disconnect. Some grabbed them with their hands, others between their legs. They looked like diagrams of molecules: the bodies are the nuclei and the tubes connecting them are bonds between electrons of opposite charges. I think that’s exactly how Bárbara’s mind must be: a fast-forward, rhizomatic, and luminous constellation.

I’m back in the dance class. I start running in circles, and with each step my body takes off even more from the floor. The radius I trace grows further and, suddenly, I manage to turn around in the air; my hands reach the floor and my body relaxes, becoming the “fainted heroine.” The harness fits painfully on my thighs, but it’s worth that pain to feel the facilitated impossibility of falling.

— Sofía Ortiz

Translated to English by Byron Davies

Cover picture: Bárbara Foulkes, Reloj de arena, 2021, Quintana Roo. Courtesy of the artist

*1:https://www.nature.com/news/2008/080411/full/news.2008.751.html