Body Without Organs

Lila Chitayat (Tel Aviv) and Gabi Schillig (Berlin)

Location: The Haus facade

The global pandemic is reshaping our reality: public and private are interchangeable, the exterior folds into the interior, and digital replaces the physical. According to Hannah Arendt, the public sphere is created not by the architecture of our built environment but through encounters and human interaction. So what happens to public space when actions and interactions alter it, inevitably reprogramming its previous functions? Bodies Without Organs examines how the presence of bodies and people affects questions of civic responsibility and agency. Specifically, the work explores the point where public and private collide, change, and transform. A building’s facade is precisely that: the point of fusion, which, like the skin, serves as a mediating layer that creates a boundary between public and private, exterior and interior. Featured across the balcony and facade of the Liebling Haus in Tel Aviv, this installation consists of hybrid spatial elements (wood and foam) that serve a dual purpose: an accessible structure and a performative device that invites visitors to observe public space.

The extensive spatial vocabulary of these artificial performative objects stimulates the human body in diverse ways, generating new relationships between body, space, and environment; between humans. The multi-sensory work incorporates both touch and audio-visual aspects. Once a person interacts with them, the elements produce sounds recorded in public situations (street protests, happenings, voices from Tel Aviv and Berlin), and readings of socio-political texts (including Hannah Arendt’s analysis of agency, freedom, action, and public space). Moments captured in different public circumstances are transported to the public-private space, inviting visitors and passers-by to communicate and converse. Meanwhile, other parts function as visual “viewing machines,” framing both the immediate surroundings seen from the balcony and a virtual spectacle of Berlin. Bodies Without Organs is a sonic organism, a hybrid, prosthetic structure that collects and regenerates ideas and thoughts about public space through an auditory and physical encounter.

Curator: Sharon Golan-Yaron

Our sincere thanks to NEVEON

“A plateau is a piece of immanence. Every BwO [Body Without Organs] is made up of plateaus. Every BwO is itself a plateau in communication with other plateaus on the plane of consistency. The BwO is a component of passage.”

A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1987)

The structures of Body Without Organs* are part of an interactive vocabulary Chitayat and Schillig developed in 2020 as a distant spatial exploration of the private/public void. Not an architectural extension nor furniture, the emerging spatial landscape is a new plateau for virtual and physical interaction. It extends the body into space while referring to Deleuze/Guattari’s BwO concept, in which an organ-less body becomes a fluid, alternating system, a new plateau of exploration and communication.

lila · Bodies Without Organs

Remote sketching between Tel Aviv and Berlin

Online video calls during a global pandemic

March 2020

Covid-19 lockdown in Berlin and Tel Aviv: we met in a new, simultaneous reality, both of us expanding our bodies and homes into offices, classrooms, meeting places, etc. We linked our homes, bodies, and home workspaces.

Researching the actual situation of a morphed public/private space.

Later, as geographic restrictions eased and the permitted movement radius extended to 2 km, we started connecting new hybrids of the public areas in both cities.