This series of three drawings was created during lockdown, which could be called the Great Confinement* in reference to Michel Foucault, based on a video recording of a performance by Japanese dancer Mikiko Kawamura. These are drawings of video screens linked to the digital and post-digital paradigm.

Mikiko Kawamura is a dancer and choreographer. Born in Japan in 1990, she works on the broken, robotized, chaotic body, subject to the urban alienation specific to megacities (Tokyo). Sometimes described as an enfant terrible of dance, fallen to Earth from another planet, Mikiko Kawamura describes her dance as an attempt to express parallel worlds, constellations of possibilities that often go unnoticed. Dance Truck is a dance performance presented in 2019 in the streets of Tokyo, whose stage is the confined interior of a cargo truck. This traveling “box” becomes the space in which the accumulated energy is released, and the performance resembles a state of disappearance: trance. In a fusion of movements reminiscent of a primal impulse, the dancer surrenders her body to the bursts of a chaotic rhythm until she is exhausted.

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Lockdown was a period of “testing” for millions of bodies forced to limit themselves, restrain themselves, and confine themselves to reduced, connected living spaces. This test acted as a necessary constraint but accentuated social alienation by limiting bodies condemned to express themselves solely through screens.
This performance by Mikiko Kawamura, created shortly before lockdown, seems to have already foreshadowed it. Mikiko plays with the expression of a Japanese doll, a very crazy interpretation of this explosive doll-like body, in a context of formatting and limitation of bodily expression, particularly in its relationship to images, screens, digital technology, and multiple boxes. The video recording of her performance seems to have been made with a simple phone that enters and settles in the confined space to reveal its spatial limitations. This digital recording, visible on YouTube, visible from my own home screen as my only connection, a digital window on the world that allowed me to create these three drawings.

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I created these drawings during this period of physical and psychological withdrawal. Constrained by this confinement, I drew the body of a woman who exploded the limits of her stage box through the aesthetic play of madness in a padded cell. She was my fantasized avatar. My intimate projection. My model exploded her doll-like body through the image. Social distancing was compensated for here by a projection of myself onto another person, a kind of post-digital catharsis during this great confinement.

*In reference to Michel Foucault who, in 1961 (in his Madness and Civilization), spoke of the great confinement to characterize royal policy in the 17th century, which was more repressive than charitable towards beggars and marginalized people. This period marked the beginning of the process of social control of the underprivileged.