Routes & Roots of movement

culture embodied and imbued into space

Movement. Guided, meandering. Arriving, departing.

In the theoretical sense, the course subjects are very present in this final week. Thoughts of the real and the ideal, language and memory, the colonial, the indigenous, all float and sink between moments in the day. I find myself delving into themes that have grown within their own context, in feels very natural. But also, I’m thinking on the fly this week, as the daily motion is especially rapid. When we come towards an ending, time shrinks as space is filled with the accumulation of intended acts and events that necessarily layer. This process, a type of saturation, somehow brings me a coherent energy. It feels active, directed activity within the landscape in which the brainstorms. Pressure concentrates thoughts into clouds, making it rain! Letting ideas fall down, reach a ground, to water the seeds that have patiently been waiting to be revisited.

When I go into my memory, it is the trails and the collective processions that I am reminded of. Walking down after visiting ruins in a hop, skip, jump back to a present reality ever changed by encountering a past. Movement along a camino, the pathways repaved each day but the passing of people. I love how tactical yet instinctual it is to make way on trails who integrate the wild patterns of natural growth, managed and maintained by human interference.

Speaking about roots and routes in class, my imaginary of tethering to place is place in those trails. And in motion. When not in narrow route, I recall most the openings of space. Where people can gather – like on that field behind the gas station, where we play football in a friendly kick-around among gringos and locals, or in the plaza/dancefloor/stage where choreographed is practiced, and up at Saqsaywsman filled with hundreds of bodies in procession of ritual performance. The union of movement, weather through a trail carved through Agua Caliente’s mountain side or in a fun little traditional dance shared among women, is a powerful collective act that imprints life into space and into memory.

At Inti Raymi festival, bodies created patterns and designs in the grassy plateau, transforming place into one of energetic celebration and spectacle. Some marched, some twirled, some lifted their arms up to Inti (sun) and directed that energy through gesture down to the Earth. The repetition of movement in such collectively intended motion was a special sight to see, a perfection to feel.

The holobiont, “ multiple living beings in close symbiosis with one another and functioning as a unit”, of flute players all lifting and landing the ring finger in the exact same second to enter a sound into space.

When we speak of culturing being alive, in constant exchange and co-creation, it brings me to a belief in this moment; that it is that tactical yet instinctual movement of bodies that becomes both visible and experiential, that imprints both an observation and embodiment crafting a mosaic of imagination and reality. Rituals orchestrate this movement; Rituals are retrieved repeatedly throughout a year, a season, a week, a day.

The energy, time, and labour put into these grand acts of ancient and contemporary culture is special to Peru. Inti Raymi, Corpus Cristi, the procession of Virigin Carmen, the weekly parades of marching musicians, the 10k race in Cusco. I wonder where/to who elsewhere/in which particular ways this devotion through movement is in practice in such masses, shared by so many.

Cultural is connected by and to bodies,
while bodies in nature keep moving…
Routes provide the flow of roots to deepen a sense of belonging to the vast, open, world of perceiving and participating, lo infinito.