RELAXATRON is a project that aims to bring emotional awareness through the body. It delves into the recognition of cues of stress within the body, its tensions, and how they are expressed. Understanding that all forms of stress impact the emotional state of an individual and how the body tends to hold onto those emotions in what is called emotional armoring.

From that perspective, RELAXATRON seeks to highlight the meaning of touch as an act that can heal through massaging and connecting with the emotions within the body. It is also a call to attention regarding the cultural differences around touching, putting value on its capacity for mind-body connection and its power to reduce stress levels.

This is how we identify different body points that can help us distress ourselves by massaging them. On one hand, we can find facial expressions and tension in the jaw and the temples. On the other hand, we distinguish between muscles that are classically disrupted by extended working hours and how they are easily touched by a third person or by ourselves: the neck and the shoulders as body parts that are constantly constrained.

Additionally, according to Chinese medicine, our hands portray the body, and through them, it is possible to heal different afflictions. There is a specific acupuncture point called Hegu, which is one of the most effective pressure points to relieve pain and migraine. Most of the time, stress, pain, and their relief, are expressed with sounds through our breathing, our voices, our screams, and also through self-dialogues inside our minds. We represented that with a sound composition made from ourselves, as a summary of all our personal experiences with stress and body tensions. This is how RELAXATRON presents itself as a garment capable of disintegrating these laments through massage, thanks to two pressure sensors located, one in the shoulder, and the other in the hand (Hegu). Once you press each sensor, the sounds of pain are dismantled and deformed into something different, as a way to represent how touching and massage can disintegrate them, relieve the pain, and transform them into something different. Moreover, once the sensor located in Hegu is pressed, there is a threshold where the pain sounds disappear, and a meditative frequency starts to sound, as a call for meditation to truly get rid of the tensions and pain within the body.

Team:

Giulia Dávila, Chloesue Harthill, Francisca Echeverría (Kika)

Performers:

Giulia Dávila, Francisca Echeverría (Kika)