At the international Art del Caminar Encounter in Girona and Banyoles Marie-Anne Lerjen produced Sweat Mapping, where she used the sweat of participants to produce a map of the journey.
Marie-Anne’s work is one of the shortlisted pieces for the 2024 Marŝarto Awards. Below, she talks about her work.
When we are on the move with our bodies, we always leave traces. We stir up dust and change the air we pass through by breathing in and out. If the movement heats us up or if the ambient temperature is hot, the body begins to actively cool down. Sweat appears. It evaporates on our skin and cools our body down. This is because the interior of our body needs a constant 37 degrees. When we walk in the heat, we leave traces of our sweat in the air and on the ground.
In summer 2022, I took part in a performance workshop at the F+F art school in Zurich. We experimented with physical movement and space. It was a hot summer. Hotter than usual; even in Zurich, hot days and tropical nights increase in summer due to the global heating. When we moved around outside, sweat quickly poured out of our pores. I started to look into the phenomenon of sweat. Sweat is part of the body’s ability to adapt to the heat. At the end of the week, I put on a short performance that focussed on the causes and the body’s reaction to heat.
As a hike in Spain in July was expected to be hot, I took my theme of ‘sweat’ there in the summer of 2024. The conference ‘Walking Art and Relational Geographies’, which took place in Catalonia from 1 to 6 July 2024, included a hike from Girona to Banyoles. Posters in the city of Girona indicated that even Spain, which is used to the heat, is suffering from rising temperatures: ‘Més llesta que la calor!’ (Smarter than the heat!) The posters gave tips on how to behave in the heat.
The group of international walking artists and guests began the hike at around 4pm in the afternoon. The sun was shining hot and sweat was pouring. ‘What is your experience with sweat?’ Along the way, I got into one-to-one conversations with the walkers about sweating and walking in the heat. At the end of each conversation, I recorded a short statement from the person about sweating. I turned this later into a short audio track.
I also asked the person for a drop of sweat, which I took from his or her skin with a small pipette and applied to a glass plate. It had taken me some time beforehand to find the right instrument for this transaction. I had placed a sketch of the course of the rivers between Girona and Banyoles under the glass plate I had brought with me. I applied the drops of sweat along these waterways. This created an almost invisible image of our sweat path.
The conversations on the way were stimulating and touching. Handling the pipette, glass plate and recording device while walking was not easy, and we didn’t want to fall behind the group. During the last 1.5 hours of walking at dusk, the temperature had dropped pleasantly. When we arrived in Banyoles after 5 hours, it was already dark.
For the same route, artist Julie Poitras Santos had asked the participants to pick up a bit of earth from the road (project: terra mòbil / tierra móvil / moving earth). In coordination with the organisers, we both concluded our projects with a performance and an exchange on the shore of Lake Banyoles on the evening of the next conference day.
On my table I still have the book ‘Bodies of Water. Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology’ by the ecofeminist Astridis Neimanis, which I would like to read in more detail. Water flows through us. The fluid released by the glands in our skin consists of 99 per cent water. We are part of the water cycle.
P.S.: The ‘Sweat Mapping’ project was followed in autumn 2024 by a further exploration of the influence of the weather in general on our senses and the walking body as part of an artistic residency and in a public walk.
The winner and honourable mention of the Marŝarto Awards 2024 will be announced in early 2025.
