ABSTRACT
Usually, concerning those paths that we think we know very well, we say that we could follow them with our eyes closed. Habits become so impregnated that our daily life is filled with mechanical gestures. Nevertheless, if we really close our eyes, suddenly we discover that this same space, so familiar before, transforms itself. Immersed in new relationships with the surrounding space, our perception is shaken. Deprived of the sense that normally orientates us in our displacements, the sense of vision, support of ontological configurations, all our other senses are sharpened. But vision is persistent. I tried its persistency in a particular way when, at the beginning of April 2009, I joined a performance proposed by Ici-Même, a French collective of artists from Grenoble. 1 This essay essentially offers a critical and phenomenological first-person account of this performance, centred on how this piece has the potential to make us discern the functions of the image as representation and the importance of sensory experience in our worldly environment. To elucidate this, I shall be calling on my reading of the work on sensation and perception of the French phenomenologist Renaud Barbaras, of the Russian critic of literature Victor Shklovsky, and of the work of Moshe Feldenkrais, researcher on the implications between thinking and the movement of the body and creator of the Feldenkrais somatic technique.
