The Resting Billboard
On show at Flucc, Vienna soon!
Audio Journey:
You might have scanned the QR code on the billboard and arrived here or found this project online. Find more information further below, and a guided audio journey accompanying the billboard here. Please see below for the script.
About the Resting Billboard:
What does resting mean to you?
It may evoke a letting go, a softening in our body-minds. Alone or in companionship, a tender relationship emerges to our bodies and to gravity. Could resting mean that we take time to listen our desires with a soft ease? Could it be a gentle resistance towards a never ending productivity? Collaging images of movement exploration and drawing, Mira Hirtz invites you into a visceral dreamscape. Scan the QR code and follow a voice to explore rest - also in public space!
The Resting Billboard, 2023 © Mira Hirtz
The audio as script:
Hello. My name is Mira, the artist who created ‘The Resting Billboard’ displayed here at Flucc, Vienna. Although I am not physically present with you I would like to invite you to follow me along a little journey. This journey offers my personal exploration of rest, and offers you insight into some processes connected to this billboard.
Maybe you are in Vienna and just scanned the QR code on the billboard. Maybe you found this link online. It doesn’t matter. Wherever you are, you can take part, however much or little engaged, in your own ways.
To begin, let us for a moment listen to the sounds around us.
The sounds of people, machines, the city, urban or not urban nature. Maybe the sound of our own thoughts mixes into this web of human and not human voices? Our thoughts come and go, and become a part of the web.
What about the sounds of our own internal body.
What about the sound of your own breathing?
Where do you feel your breath right now?
Without judging or thinking about what should be happening, notice your breathing.
Your breathing is a tool. An imagination. Send it through your whole body.
And with sending your breathing through your body, become curious to encounter
soft areas
tight areas
areas where you don’t know what is happening.
Simply notice, how your body is a collage of these different areas. They are connected, yet differentiated. They form many landscapes.
Like the Billboard, our bodies consist of subtle landscapes of different shapes. Seen from further away, they might present an gesture that is not easy to define. And from closer, there are many details and layers. Some things are almost hidden. Some are in the foreground. For some it’s not clear where they end or begin.
Notice where you touch the ground. I recommend to lie down for this, but you could do it in any posture - sitting, standing, walking.
Focus on these points where you touch the floor, and imagine a softening of the tissues there. Almost like your weight gently drops a little further.
Then, imagine a softening in the tissues in your backspace, whether you are lying on your back or not. The back of your torso. Of your hips. Of your shoulders, your neck, your head. Let us drop our frontal orientation, which we commonly inhabit in everyday life, towards this backspace.
If your eyes were closed, open them gently.
Can the backspace stay present. And could the eyes soften too?
What do your eyes see?
How do they see?
A wondering gaze. A lazy gaze.
Maybe the gaze wonders across the billboard. Does the billboard inform you in any way? It shows a collage of bodies that lean, lie on the floor, and touch. They give weight, by releasing tension towards gravity, or by pulling another outstretched hand. They interweave with the other collaged images, which are circular, organic shapes and lines. Some are of strong brown colours. Some are in pale pink, beige, yellow and blue colours. These lines and shapes form visceral landscapes like those of inner organs or nervous systems.
Can these visceral landscapes evoke memories
of
being lazy
Of being held?
Let us rest into these memories and let us rest from
work
from worries
from people
from ourselves
from
nothing specific. We rest just as a way of being. Here and now.
And we wait.
What emerges from that? Small wiggles, large stretches, abrupt shifts? Movement? Play? Discomfort? Pain? Something ungraspable?
Stillness? A wide stillness, or a stillness like in a cave?
What if rest means that we take the time to listen to what we desire?
In the background of the billboard, there are smaller images. They repeat like a pattern and show bodies moving in relation to each other. Fine drawings mark their movement, arrows point to points of touch and gravity, curves follow the dynamic movements.
Give your sensations a shape, a gesture
oOr a drawing
or a word
or simply let it happen. It might change as you are following along,
it might surprise you.
And you could simply do nothing.
