Florin Flueras : Collapse Yoga

Collapse Yoga mixes Yoga with possible "negative" states as distress, sadness, illness, anxiety, hopelessness, worry, renouncement, exhaustion, grief, boredom, decrepitude, pain, failure, fear and their traces in the body. It collides Yoga's aims for coordination, balance, strength, straightness, flexibility, alignment, control, with the body's deep desires for relaxation, asymmetry, incoordination, weakness, freedom, unbalance, abandon, collapse. It affects the normativity of the human form. Collapse Yoga is sometimes practiced next to intimidating buildings, monuments, in charged public spaces associated with cultural stiffness, harmful ethics or bad politics. It can tune our bodies with natural, social and personal collapsing environments, affecting maybe some of them. The relation with our own bodies tends to extend to the entire reality – there is a correspondence and influence between the body's politics and society's problems.

(Western) Yoga, like many other somatic or spiritual practices, has an improving, purifying, positive feel, a personal growth tone, an aspirational and healthy thinking aesthetic. Collapse Yoga is a technique attuned to a serenity potential but also to the presence of collapse in our society and in our lives. It is implicitly commenting on the fact that there is ideology and politics in the body. And that too much insistence on a certain alignment, coordination, control, straightness and positivity might not be the path to a body that can sensibly affect and be affected by a collapsing world.

Photo by Alina Popa

Documentation as text — notes from inside the practice

Images and a note from 3 sessions of Collapse Yoga in front of the Environment Ministry Bucharest. (2024)

In the last two sessions police came to tell us to leave because we were blocking the cars' access to the sidewalk. Yes, the people from the Environment Ministry are parking their mostly big cars on the sidewalk in front of it.

The text for the third session:
Open session of Collapse Yoga, 25 October, 15h, in front of the Environment Ministry, Bucharest. The building is shared with SRI (secret services), and across the street is the Parliament.

This is not a protest. It just seems a very good location for practicing Collapse Yoga – the proximity of these institutions might affect our bodies in ways that are conducive to it. More than using art for political purposes is about using politics as a medium, for artistic purposes.

The Environment Ministry is known to be friendly with multiple oligarchic structures. The logging mafia cuts the forests in close cooperation with the ministry's people in the territory. The garbage mafia imports and burns dangerous waste around Bucharest and other cities, undisturbed. The “real estate sharks” destroy the green spaces in cities – right now the trees in IOR park are poisoned and burned to clear the space for “development”, and there are other parks that already had this treatment or they're planned to be next. Bucharest has only 7m² of green space/person instead of the mandatory 26m², more than 50% of its green spaces have become buildings and parking lots since 2000. It's the most polluted European Capital, with the highest car density, and instead of creating more green spaces, pietonal streets or bike paths for reducing traffic and pollution, measures are being taken to make it worse: more car infrastructure is developed (lanes, roads, bridges, parking lots), destroying more green spaces in the process and inducing more traffic and pollution.

In the same building is SRI, which is known to be behind a lot of the “journalism” and the oligarchic politics of Romania. Across the street is the Parliament which, among other laws for restricting freedoms, plans to restrict the public access to forests and ease their logging. They also plan laws that would allow “developers” to legally destroy the few remaining green spaces in cities.

Being there, surrounded by this political landscape, our bodies might be affected in more or less visible ways. Collapse Yoga is a way of working with this type of background distress that is only likely to increase, it's a preparation for a future that is already here.

"October 3, in front of the Environment Ministry
My body is intimidated by the mafia-looking guys who walk from and to their big black cars parked in front of the entrance. I feel weakness in my limbs, the proximity of evil. The weakness increases. I can barely keep the phone in my hand. It's difficult to stand. A car parked in front of the stairs has “wrs” on its plate. It makes me think of their war with nature. Their involvement in cutting the forests was repeatedly exposed. In the same building is SRI (secret services), known to be behind a lot of the “journalism” and the oligarchic politics of Romania. Across the street, in the Parliament they plan to restrict the public access to forests for easing their logging, and to ease the destruction of the few remaining green spaces in cities for “development”. The weakness in my body advances. I'm in a fragile, submissive posture, bent, head hanging in front, hands clenched, hanging downwards, phone getting further from my eyes, difficult to write. I feel it's not ok to stay like this in this stiff, scary place. Fear passes through my body. The thought that I might get another big fine crossed my mind. Body stays in this defeated posture, doing some very fine adjustments to deepen the humiliation coming from these institutions and their people. The Yoga aspect kicked in and I feel the posture as a charged asana connecting abstractly with the shapes and colors around, the oligarchic institutions and their people losing importance, my body losing fear. Not only losing fear but gaining a power to affect, switching to Political Sorcery mode against the evil doers of these places." (note from inside the practice, more notes)