Awena Cozannet has chosen the dialogue between the world of art and the world of the body as a means of encounter, a support of creation, an object of collaborations and influences. Where is Awena’s body? Is it double, amplified, embodied? What is this ever so frail body?
Is it an idea which has become reality?
Is it a means to be on earth and share sensations?
The body is a curiosity, a plastic substance, a shape, a medium. Awena uses it as an excuse for happenings which she prepares meticulously to make sure spontaneity is present. Life is a kit. We must permanently make up and throw together the raw materials. It is important to find combinations, arrangements so that between living and one self a presence, a destiny, a person, a proof of existence materializes. The arrayed body is an activator, not a memory, not a vision. It is a hyphen where emotions are in turn sewn together. It is a place of identical and different which materializes characteristics, individualities, to find out what is common between them. True field of inquiry, Awena Cozannet’s body summons the unanimity of a group. It is imposed to all in a game of hide and seek, where it appears fleeting. The linen and the wandering make it a media of exchange. The performance is the privileged time chosen. It is destined to unite with the other, the others. The ambiguity of Awena is to assert her personality by fading away. She draws anew her slender features by covering it up with textile creations. Thus redefined, sometimes buried, always transformed, she is helped by the ever-presence of an unsettling and disconcerting effect where reality and virtuality, individual and collectivity merge. At each creation, Awena reconsiders the place and position of her body. She questions its limits, hides them, spreads them to reach the other, to make the spectators participate. She goes on the stage without provocation nor violence. She creates rituals where each one of us has an appointment with himself to rediscover himself.
Awena dives into the unknown of the others, goes beyond the limits of her appearance, dresses to underline the singularity, the force and the feelings. This mutation of the body into a link calls to our minds the interpersonal, the acceptance, the difference. Ceaselessly, Awena diversifies her ornaments and her artistic research. Here, there is no question of blood, muscles and organs but of skin, texture, clothed flesh, ageless humanity and never a stranger to herself. Awena’s body is an accessory to wear all sorts of forms and metamorphosis, to experiment on a playfully with a moving ceremonial. The body is an integrant part of the birth. Awena seems to suspend the materiality of her being according to the situations, the faces she has come across and the spaces the goes through. In order to do this, she rests on her ideas, on her dreams, on an ingrown creativity, on her desire to converse and to make groups. Awena takes leave of herself. She endorses a shell and structures which impose to her a link with the world, modifies her perceptions and determine her attitudes so that the people she meets can, in turn, change their world.
The voyage towards those who have maintained their traditions alive feeds her artistic approach. The going forward and backward between her and the others, between a here and there render any posture unstable.
It is inside, within these accessories of disappearing and appearing, at the core of this organic skin that she builds herself up, that she discovers new forms of movements worn directly on her body. Awena underlines her being and examines it from all sides. She reveals discretely and with surprise a part of herself. This presence summons the temporary. The body becomes subject, incarnation, mirror, head-spinner of oneself.
Each creation invites each one of us to enter in ourselves. Each performance contributes to the construction of a short-lived group.
Each meeting is a party time. Sticking to oneself, putting up a united front, is to render life visible.