Masaje scanner. Idoia Zabaleta

Masaje Scanner is the third in a series of massages that Idoia Zabaleta began in 2017 with Masaje de texto and continued in 2021 with Pupa, pupita, pupila. Un masaje de la visión. On 20 May 2023, she inaugurated this piece, which was conceived for the Atoi space (Bilbao), in her first exhibition, coinciding with the launch of the critical review and annotated bibliography dedicated to Idoia on foku.info by the artists’ cooperative Tractora Koop E.

In autumn 2025, with the support and guidance of Tractora, a self-supporting version of Masaje Scanner is created and presented for the first time at Halfhouse (Barcelona), as part of Sâlmon Festival.

Idoia will operate the Masaje Scanner machine in five daily sessions as a performance for a single person.

The performance begins with the reception of one person at a time. In an antechamber, a film projector projects a dance of three Rs onto a beam of fog (Rare, Romantic, Real). R-Isadora is the preliminary piece, the opening act, which proposes a first copy of light. When the fog dissipates and the mirrored dance of the Rs ends, you are invited to lie down on a stretcher, where the zero gesture of kinetics, continuous movement, begins to roll. A 30-metre fabric slides over your body. At face level and over your open eyes, two overlapping layers of colour follow one another, from pink to yellow and red, interrupted by the black lines of the signs printed on the fabric. At the same time, the body vibrates on a stretcher that emits the repetition of five Rs, tongue and palate, emitted by a subwoofer at the height of the sacrum. This sound overlaps with a mantra that cries out a spell of the times: as romantic as it is realistic, radiating radiance, raging with rage and becoming radical from the root.

Programme in collaboration with Halfhouse