Daniel Firman has always used the body – his own or other people’s – within the range of its instrumental capabilities, never attempting to adapt it to fantasies beyond its physical mechanisms. He conceives of the body performing actions that lie within its real potential. Learning to occupy a space is not a subjective matter, nor a personal development challenge, but a way of imparting form to space, of making it become by using the body within a framework.  And Rudolf Von Laban’s « Kinesphere » provided a means of defining the body as an instrument; in other words, a way to describe its objective and spatial limits – in the same way as one might display a tool in its case -, and to suggest the infinity of ‘programmings’ that the body is capable of within those limits.

With the Kinesphere series, Daniel Firman attempts a physical creation of Laban’s « Kinesphere » and he exhausts the infinite possibilities contained in one single materialisation. Daniel Firman uses the body to programme a space. The space was in-formed in every direction around a stationary position: the body is the central axis and it pushes to the edge an imprint of a volume corresponding – once moulded – to the inversion of his movement. In each Kinesphere piece, this movement is decided beforehand and the artist does not go back on the programme he has set himself. The inscription of these movements in the material is a product of writing or drawing the space at point-blank range as they say with gunshots. The volume is a trace, the body is a kind of intaglio.