“ZERO” is that which precedes everything, or what remains when everything has ceased. An origin and a final threshold at the same time. It was the exit from my mother's body, and my entrance into this world.

My mouth is that threshold where words attempt to be born. My throat, my stomach, resonate with their ghost. Breath that burns like a fire, prior to language.

“Zero” as an attempt to capture the intangible, to outline the human desire to make a world through matter. A gesture that stumbles at the very edge of meaning, showing the impossibility of grasping that which, like liquid, slips through the fingers.

The piece is a poetic exploration where the body is a living, mutable language, a surface that folds over itself, overflowing its meanings.

The performer inhabits the space as a fragmentary archive: a body full of gaps, tensions, and desires in the process of reconfiguration. A sensitive landscape as an organism that thinks, listens, and is affected by itself. This body coexists with a constellation of speculative objects as vestiges of a non-linear time. Memories inscribed of an extinct language, or one still to come.

I dedicate this piece to my mother, Aurora, and thank her for giving me life and for accompanying me in this world until her last day, October 4, 2024 <3
 
Created and performed by Manuel Rodriguez

Installation, Images and light: Manuel Rodriguez

Supervision: Darko Dragicevic

Supported by Stockholm University of the Arts within the frame of the Master Program “New Performative Practices”.

Photo: Gergely Lászlo Ofner