In melanie bonajo’s When the Body Says Yes, the sensation of touch is foregrounded as an essential lingua franca, possibly the most essential. In the film we are invited to follow our curiosity, and explore the universe of micro-movement, with emphasis placed on “the intensity of the movement or encounter,” rather than on its size. “Connect to your sensual and erotic sense,” we are encouraged in the experimental work, and be prepared for an experience that is “playful, open, humorous, symbiotic, sensual.”
In the film, which was part of an immersive installation for Venice Biennale 2022, trust and consent are presented as absolute values, as folk talk about their experiences of touch and their relationships with their bodies. Throughout, the film’s many participants engage in the process of communal and sensual touch; naked, supine and much of the time doused in oil. The whole event is staged within a large, soft, pink room akin to the inside of a womb.
One Chinese woman tells how touch is not regarded in the same way back in China, how the “hug thing” is something she adopts only when abroad. A man from a broken home could never recognise the “family hug’ vibe he would see on television, and took a long time before he could experience or even understand the value of self-touch, a core knowledge that now enables him to “stand in his own dignity.”
“I love touch because it is so simple,” says another participant. “Touch and intimacy should be a human right.” A fellow companion notes how “verbalising consent and boundaries has allowed for a lot more to happen,” in the experience and enjoyment of touch.
All the time, the fun and frolicking continue on screen, with individuals at times indulging in lubed-up body surfing.
Later, participants talk both seriously and playfully about their genitals. One man rails at the cruelty of the circumcision he had as a child, an act that he would never have consented to. His penis has lost 80% of its sensitivity, he says, and he hates both the look and the feel of it. “I want to feel the way I was intended to be, not the way I was made to be.”
A woman would have liked her genitals to be more fluffy, and placed somewhere she could see them. And she’d like them to have teeth.
In essence, the film amounts to a search for intimacy in a world whose preoccupations are altogether more commercial, with all the tendencies towards personal loneliness that may entail.
Talking to art critic Brigita Reinert in 2023, bonajo commented: “I went on this journey to find spaces where I could be in connection with people – a connection that is not only a sexual or romantic relationship but one where you experience a proximity that feels much more like our childhood experiences with friends. In childhood, we did not have these boundaries – touch was not yet sexualised. I was really craving this place of innocence, and I realised it was not there. I am a sensory person; I like to touch people and I like to be touched and held. That’s why I wanted to take ‘touch’ out of the ‘sexual space’ and make it available as a broader language that we can all learn to speak.”
The final word goes to one of the film’s participants whose narration is heard over a blindfold and very slippery mass session. “Touch is a way of telling one another we belong in a flock.”
This article originally appeared in SEE NL, published by EYE Filmmuseum in collaboration with The Netherlands Film Fund.
