Peeled Bodies, on Multiplicity of Being
Workshop Facilitated by Anna Kushnerova

In-Person Artistic & Cinematographic Gathering
Cabo de Gata, Almeria, Spain
April 13-18, 2025 held by www.lafraguabruta.com

This workshop emerges as a continuation of my research into the multiplicity of bodies—a choreographic and symbolic exploration of the layers that constitute our being.

We will work with duplicates of our bodies—tracing, cutting, peeling, discarding, reconfiguring. The body becomes self-referential, explorative, polyphonic—a shifting organism of skins, impressions, and echoes. A movement ritual where the self is both contained and porous, splitting and merging, dissolving and reassembling.

Inspired by the Vedic cosmology of the multiple sheaths (koshas)—annamaya (physical), pranamaya (vital), manomaya (mental), vijnanamaya (wisdom), and anandamaya (bliss)—we will engage in a practice of material and energetic doubling. What happens when we place our breath into a paper replica of ourselves? How do we move with the shadow of our own becoming?

The peeled red body—a symbol of exposure, vulnerability, and transformation—guides this inquiry. The thin membrane of paper echoes the ephemeral layers we inhabit and discard. Red—like raw flesh, like molten earth, like the pulse beneath the skin, like the invisible portal of the ultra red —becomes the threshold between embodiment and shedding, presence and dissolution.

Where are you, lying down on my side, in the corner of your garden, under my cover of mosses, waiting…
It has been two thousand years since I lay down for you.
Your breath could bring me back from the dead.
Can you, in me, be everything that you need to be?
I want to arrive but I don’t have a body in which to make an appearance.
I come from the ground, that is, from the front of the scene, into this intense garden. I come as a voyeur.

(Helen Cixous)