The body of the object

"Why this desire to bring what is inanimate to life, when I have a body-instrument already "on hand"?

I found a kind of response in the comparison one could draw with Taoist thought, notably in lecture given by sinologist  François Julien in "A Garden Big as a Grain of Mustard":

"The elite of painting in China preferred the portrayal of a stock of bamboo or a rock to that of the human body (...).  They can take all forms, not appearing before they have an internal coherence, whereas the form of the human body is constant.  It's a question of finding this internal coherence, which means that a rock is made of what a rock is, when it's left alone to take its shape."  "In thinking about the human body, one should look to its breath-energy (qi) and at its bony structure.  Rocks have the bony structure of the Sky and the Earth and the breath-energy that inhabits them also.  That's why we call rocks the "Roots of clouds".  Rocks without breath-energy are dead bony structures (petrified) exactly like the human skeleton without breath-energy is a dead bony structure." "It's enough to allow to appear, through their rocky mass, the lines of force existing within their composition and in which circulates the same cosmic energy that is to be found in the energy channels of the human body."

My manipulating hands become thus the "bony structure" of the object, the process consists of finding the "the pathway to the soul", letting myself be guided by its fundamental form and constituting matter.  Paying finally relatively little attention to why it was created, even though this will surely have an indirect influence on its "capacities".  In the same way, the sound, directly linked to the manipulation, acts as a sort of trompe l'oeil.  Coming from the movements, they evoke a universe that overflows from each object's primal reality, amplifying their inclinations, enlarging their field of action."
 

^{Nicole Mossoux • 2008}