How can water give birth to eternal fire?

Mackenzy Bergile describes his solo work Autothérapie as a cartography of scars. Like traumatic memory itself, the spiral-shaped, fragmented movements form self-therapy sessions and circumvent any form of narrative linearity. 

How can water give birth to eternal fire? is the continuation of Autothérapie and precursor to Scarred Geography (2027). The piece occupies an intermediate space and draws its strength precisely from this tension: it is inspired both by the intimate dynamics of Autothérapie and the geographical, political and historical dimension of Scarred Geography.

The movements, which we can sometimes read as open wounds, are both intimate and political. From family histories with their ruptures and interpersonal traumas to geopolitical memories of segregation, the violence of the Berlin Conference that divided Africa into zones of domination, or the Atlantic crossing and its accompanying uprooting.

Bergile was inspired by British-French poet Kenneth White's “geopoetics”: the interpretation of territories based on both earthly fractures and the imagination that animates them. Bergile is committed to a geopoetics of redistribution: a world map inscribed on bodies marked by exile, uprooting and migration. Identity, history and transmission are constantly renegotiated and played out here.

• Mackenzy Bergile is a Franco-Haitian interdisciplinary artist — choreographer, pianist, poet and researcher — whose practice explores issues of memory, domination and transmission through the body and movement. Trained in traditional Haitian dance, African-American and contemporary dance, classical music and visual arts, he has developed a body of work that lies at the intersection of performance, theoretical research and postcolonial criticism.