A Procession to Nirvana: A Funeral for Your Thoughts
What thoughts, spirals, neuroses, unhinged speak, or, unkindness do you wish to release?
Un-think?
Deaden?
Bury?
The audience is invited into a procession walk dedicated to Nirvana’s troupe and its founder Kazuko Tsujimura. It begins though a walk from Heirlom Centre for Art and Archives with body_hacker (aka Sall Lam Toro) carrying an effigy figure made by Yoshiko Shimada, in silence, ceremonial, slowly, with an intentional attention to become embodied by this troupe visionaries (Nirvana). We enter a space of meditation through a sort of incantation type of text directed at Nirvana (down below). this act results in opening collective vessel body and a shared sensitivity, while sitting down at the king’s garden in a circle, attuning to the troupe’s practice of body co-ownership concept through gestures of interconnectedness and collective bodily possession.
The scores developed by body_hacker unfold as processual acts of co-existence; those seen and felt between our bodies, the ghosts surrounding us, and embedded in the relationships we carry with us.
The audience is later invited into a funerary ritual focusing on the action of burying a chosen thought into the ground, collectively. We dig small holes with a spoon and extract our thought to be buried. We meditate on this action, giving it time and intention and walk back to Heirloom to close the ritual in the space.
Nirvana Evocation Text
(read repeatedly by the audience in the following languages)
Vessels, we re-become
Breathing same air
Our core is centripetal
Our core, impregnated with desire
Our core, centrifugal
We move as many
Possessed in the flesh
In the trance of catastrophe and chaos
For, we move as many
Possessed in the flesh
The world exists in ambiguity
The end already is,
Already has been
The world exists beyond what we see
And touch
So, do we!
We move as many
Possessed in the flesh
Platonically betrothed in spirit
A kinship of eternal care
We move as many!
我々は再び器になる
同じ空気を呼吸する
我々の核は中心に向かう
我々の核は願いに満ちている
我々の核は外に向かう
我々は一団となって動く
肉体に取り憑かれ
破滅と混沌の恍惚の中で
なぜなら、我々は一団となり、
肉体に取り憑かれ
世界は曖昧さの中に存在する
終わりはもうある
すでにあった
世界は我々が視覚や触覚を超えて存在する
そして我々も！
我々は一団となって動く
肉体に取り憑かれながら
プラトニックな精神のつながり
永遠のの温かい心のつながり
我々は一団となって動く
Kroppe, vi bliver til igen
Vi ånder samme luft
Vores kerne er centripetal
Vores kerne, befrugtet af længsel
Vores kerne, centrifugal
Vi bevæger os som mange
Kroppen besat
I katastrofens og kaossets trance
For vi bevæger os som mange
Besatte i kroppen
Verden eksisterer i tvetydighed
Enden er allerede tilstede,
Har allerede været
Verden eksisterer hinsides det, vi ser
Rører ved
Som vi også gør det!
Vi bevæger os som mange
Kroppen besat
Platonisk trolovet i ånd
Et slægtskab af evig omsorg
Vi bevæger os som mange!
The performance was part of the exhibition Disappearing Body – Becoming Tsujimura presents the Japanese artist Yoshiko Shimada in collaboration with two Denmark-based artists: composer and sound artist Aase Nielsen, and performance artist Body_hacker. Together, they explore the legacy of the groundbreaking Japanese dancer and performer Kazuko Tsujimura (1941–2004).
Kazuko Tsujimura was part of Japan’s post-war avant-garde, active from the 1960s onward. She participated in a number of collaborations, groups, and collectives across art forms and introduced the concept of ‘dance without body, without dance’. Despite her extensive oeuvre, Tsujimura’s groundbreaking work was largely overlooked by history. A rich archive of photographic material from performances, shows, and fragmented installations remained untouched in stacked boxes at her brother’s home until 2017, when artist and researcher Yoshiko Shimada ensured the transfer of the materials to the archive of Keio University Art Center in Tokyo.
In Disappearing Body – Becoming Tsujimura, this archival material is presented to the public for the first time. The title of the exhibition weaves together Tsujimura’s lifelong artistic and spiritual explorations of body, dance, and movement with Yoshiko Shimada’s innovative performance and archival practice – across time and space. For decades, Shimada has worked to highlight overlooked practices of female artists and has reactivated artistic kinships in her own works through performance and reinterpretation of concepts, identities, and bodies.
The exhibition at HEIRLOOM showcases selected parts of Tsujimura’s extensive photographic archive alongside Shimada’s reinterpretations, in combination with new performance- and sound-based works by Body_hacker and Aase Nielsen. Here, archive and body meet, as the artists collectively evoke the sensibility embedded within the archive – through explorations of ideas around transgression and transfeminine expression in Tsujimura’s conceptual artistic practice. Her oeuvre is recontextualised through performances, reenactments, and interventions in the exhibition space, and the exhibition explores themes such as rituals, spiritual practice, kinship, and collective memory.
curation and text by bluestockings(BS)
photo documentation by Malle Madsen, and courtesy Heirloom and Bluestockings (bs)
effigy by Yoshiko Shimada
sound by Aase Nielsen
text by body_hacker
mandala installation by body_hacker
translation of text in Japanese Yoshiko Shimada
translation of text in Danish bluestockings
performed on the 19.06.2025, Copenhagen, Denmark