Jessica Boston Discusses This Feeling is You at the MACBA
Hypnosis and electronic music in a new form of meditation. The hypnoartist Jessica Boston and the duo Desert celebrate this Saturday a collective meditation experiment as part of the MACBA program 'Distances to the end of the month' Jessica Boston and Desert talk to YOROKOBU magazine about tonight’s performance.
Forget having seen anything like it. Today mindfulness walks around the corners. Yoga, meditation, ASMR, CrossFit that takes the stress out in jets of sweat. But what will happen next Saturday, at 7.30 pm, here at MACBA, has nothing to do with it. You are going to face a collective meditation experiment based on hypnosis and guided by the hypnoartist Jessica Boston and the electronic duo Desert.
"I want it to be a surprise!" Says Boston.
“This Feeling is You album is a beauty, but it is also an incredibly powerful therapeutic tool and the application of everything I know about hypnosis so that a person can make changes in their life. Hypnosis is both art, science and magic. That is the point where I think it is situated. The artists from Desert, Cristina Checa and Eloi Caballé say that what will happen on Saturday as part of the MACBA End-of-Month Distances program, in collaboration with Uniqlo, is not a concert: «It is an action, an experiment. It is important for people to relax, to connect. We even recommend that they get in a comfortable place.
It is also an art installation with enveloping sounds and visuals. «The music and the texts go slowly. The little noises and textures are there to amplify the experience, ”says Eloi Caballé. You can look at the screen as if you were looking at a painting. You can fixate or close your eyes. The staging is not the most important thing. Do what you want. The experiment for next Saturday, July 25, is based on the album This Feeling is You, which was composed together by the hypnosis therapist and the electronics duo. «It is a special album because it has therapeutic use. It is an artistic project with a brutal conceptual level. We put it in a very different way from a pop music album, ”explains Caballé. "But the staging on Saturday goes much further because we want the viewer to have many more inputs than when listening to the album."
Checa insists that the idea of this experiment is to "find yourself", and that makes you "the final artist." They already lived their journey when they created the album. They started with the rational: they looked for, read and studied the techniques of hypnosis. But when they started composing, all the information disappeared. Their minds went blank, and they were guided by Jessica Boston's voice for the sounds to emerge.
"It was super intuitive," says Checa. “There were times when you were almost sleeping but with your eyes open. We disconnect from our rational part. It was very different from the process we follow when we make pop. Hypnosis is not magic or the cheap spectacle that some television programs popularized: a guy asleep, walking with his arms in front, looking naked, despite being dressed, and embarrassed in front of an audience with a clean laugh. Hypnosis was born in the hands of science.
Jessica Boston has been working hypnosis with her patients for over ten years. During this time, he has discovered how powerful sounds and words are. He says that they have a lot of strength to change ideas, emotions and the sense of reality. So years ago, talking to Desert, the idea of making a record came up. Boston is convinced that music amplifies the power of meditation. Relax and lead to other states of consciousness. It regulates the hormones that cause stress and the dopamine that helps so much to be happy. In his album, and in the session next Saturday, what he tries to do is experiment with the sensation of being present, to explore the subconscious, to find the total consciousness of being alive.
