album # 4: publication ‘lo tocante’ by aimar pérez galí

Lo tocante, by dancer and researcher Aimar Pérez Galí is the fourth publication released by Album. It is part of Pérez Galí’s wider project The Touching Community; an embodied research project that explores the impact of the HIV/AIDS crisis in the dance community. Since 2015, Pérez Galí has been investigating the impact of the AIDS epidemic in the context of Spanish and Latin American dance, and connects it to the parallel expansion of ‘contact improvisation’, a form of dancing in which movement is improvised based on physical contact between two or more bodies. The Touching Community is also a work on the tactile and contact as a survival tool.

To date, The Touching Community has been brought to life in a performance work that premièred in November 2016 in the Casa de la Dansa of the Mercat de les Flors, Barcelona, and has since been performed at various locations. The publication Lo tocante, which is Album’s action #4, can now be added to this. The core of Lo tocante is formed by twenty letters written by Pérez Galí, halfway between the epistolary genre and fiction writing. The book and the performance piece relate it each other closely: both explore the relationship between the body and writing, between touch and movement, between memory and publication.

The publication Lo tocante is designed by Roger Adam, who works between Barcelona and Mexico City. His work includes designing the Spanish edition of André Lepecki’s Exhausting Dance (2005; published in Spanish as Agotar la danza, 2009) as well as the book Sudando el discurso by Pérez Galí that accompanies the dance piece of the same name.

[Image, clockwise: Album # 3 – Duen Sacchi, Ficciones patógenas, 2018 (co-edited by Brumaria), interior illustration; Album # 4 – Aimar Pérez Galí, Lo tocante, 2018 (produced by Eremuak), interior illustration; Aimar Arriola & Jeleton, Jornadas Eremuak: editar, producir, programar, 2013, still from the video; Album # 1 – Style As Resistance, 2011,  photography of the physical publication; Album # 2 – Antonio Gagliano, El espíritu del siglo XX, 2014, interior illustration.]