Removing the body from the feed * 2025
Casa POP (Azores, Portugal)
Removing the Body from the Feed is a 10–12 minute poetry slam / performative installation by António Baía Reis that operates as a live counter-feed: a spoken intervention designed to interrupt algorithmic attention and return aesthetic experience to the body, breath, and shared space. Developed from Reis’s ongoing writing practice, particularly his recurring museum visits (notably to the Thyssen in Madrid, where Caravaggio’s Saint Catherine becomes a recurring “threshold” of attention), the piece argues that when aesthetic experience is truly lived, it becomes dense identity-matter: something that re-grounds the self and reclaims autonomy from technological overstimulation.
Presented in the Azores within the joint context of the POP Festival 2025 and the International Forum “Citizenship Through Aesthetics” (2025) at Casa POP (Ponta Delgada), the work is intentionally minimal and portable, designed to happen with little more than voice projection (or a microphone) and a music stand. Its aim is not to “perform poetry” as content, but to stage attention as a political and sensorial act: a deliberate refusal of the feed’s tempo, and a reactivation of presence without devices mediating the encounter.
At its conceptual core is a blunt premise: we live inside a collective trance in which feeling is increasingly outsourced to feeds, systems that do not merely curate content, but quietly instruct us on what to feel, when to feel it, and how long it should last. Removing the Body from the Feed responds through what Reis calls “lucid disobedience”: a poetics of interruption that cuts through noise and reinstates aesthetics as civic practice, a way of rebuilding identity through sensory experience and common listening.
The performance unfolds as a three-part deprogramming of the body:
1. Cut the algorithm - a spasmodic rhythm that mimics feed logic (scroll / retention / reward / noise). The voice stutters, fails, and derails on purpose; every silence becomes sabotage. The body refuses the machine’s cadence.
2. Body returned - the tempo collapses. The voice drops. The performer “relearns” what it means to be a body: stumbling, breathing, restarting. Language loosens its grammar and regains flesh, here. Aesthetics is not “beauty” but survival.
3. Manifesto of aesthetic citizenship - nothing resolves. The manifesto arrives as fractured statements under pressure, including a central refusal: “I don’t want to feel at the speed of the feed.” The word does not soothe; it bites. The body remains.
The impact is a sensory interruption of habitual attention. By hacking the logic of the feed through live presence, Removing the Body from the Feed proposes poetry as an instrument of re-inscription, a public reclaiming of perception, agency, and shared time.