Sall Lam Toro "Lutos de Amor (Grievances of love)" (2018)
Artist statement:
Sall Lam Toro is an Afro-Portuguese Queer artist based in Aarhus (DK) mainly working with conceptual live art, poetry, video performance
and embodied practices such as butoh and improvisational dance. She is interested in deconstructing, re-signifying and examining the tensions between
social and visceral body through concepts of decolonization, rhizome philosophy, and queer theory.
Lam Toro is interested in practices and settings of sharing, engagement and involvement with audiences, thus creating contexts / spaces
where there is collective transformation and a rise of new social practices by challenging old / current ones existing in a determined place.
Further, she is interested in a combination of queering and decolonizing geography by creating a practice-based methodology utilizing such
theoretical concepts in performative settings challenging notions of identity formation and social practice.
Sall Lam Toro website
statement / about the work
About the work:
"Lutos de Amor (Grievances of love): Linear-NOT | Life is a durational performance-happening of a butoh walk journey through a mapping of the instabilities
of the body while the remembrance of the condition of grieving is present. It is about the performative space of mourning, a butoh walk mapping of grief.
Butoh dance emerged in post-war Japan in the 60's out of the countrys rebuilding, national crisis, rapid economic growth, and disease.
The idea of recollecting a weakened or handicapped body within everyday life corporeality was the catalyst for a new form of movement and artistic research, which consequently,
marked the path for butoh philosophy. I am taking inspiration from ankoku butoh which is a classical form of butoh in which the body personifies the states of death, illness,
dissonance, perturbance, and alike to create a corporeal visual mapping of an examination and challenging of the concept of love-grief in material, visceral and mental forms.
Furthermore, the question arises towards the audience: HOW DO YOU GRIEVE LOVE? And a mapping is drawn through black lines onto the walls and floors with pivotal points
informing the curse of this mourning state, and, how it moves transforming with time.
The body accompanies this mapping interpreting the points within the butoh walk, mourning gets activated at corporeal level in a quasi-directed form.
With the action of ash-walking from Butoh dance practices, mourning gets moved onto space and time.
Additionally, this inspection of grief also arises through western-death symbolism - the colour black signifier of death and loss, and the merging between black candles within the black body,
however, death here means not nothingness rather, there is movement through this death into the sublime, and, there is a moving towards transcendence.
It gets transformed into color, wind blowing, water flowing, trees breathing." (--Sall Lam Toro)