BODY SWEATS
Event: Ubikeklektic festival
Zebegény, 29.08.2016
(Text and audio lost)
Performance is a gift, a sacrifice, a production of prints.
Preparation: putting out the props. In the background, ink drawings reminiscent of black and white calligraphy texts of Tao Te King on Japanese calligraphy paper on the white wall. Memory of the East.
On the floor, objects: computer keyboard, wooden spoons for cooking, white paper wind chips, 1st wooden board with rifle bullet, 2nd wooden board with rope, flour bowl, sieve, sound-making tools recycled from garbage.
Start: common ritual. Smearing honey and blowing gold dust on the performer’s face. The performer circulates among the audience. Steps up to the audience with a black slate, there are gold dust and honey on it. She offers her face. The spectators dip their fingers in the honey, smear the honey on the performer’s face and blow the gold dust on it.
The sounds, the text, the action begin.
The action: touching objects, moving objects, making them sound. The images of the Tao Te King texts, the materiality of objects and gestures, the disregard of objects, the humanity of objects, the intelligible and indecipherable voices of women, the logical and non-logical actions of women, are a cacophonous dialogue in which the viewer tries to find clues and find one’s way. It is a hopeless endeavour; what remains is to enter into presence, to build up a meditative state of Zen. The non-verbalizable musical sounds constantly cross over into the text and back, helping and guiding the zen construction. The commonplace and cliché-like phrases are released. Text is important, spanning time and space, expanding the logic of present understanding. “Pokemon go to Auschwitz.”, it says at one point. The present state of memory of the West.
The ending: the performer lies down on the floor, her female companion sifting flour over her body. The mind quiets. The female figure lies immersed in substances: honey, gold, flour. Afterwards, her imprint on the concrete floor, both a funeral imprint, as well as a creation imprint. Presence always falls into the past, the power of the vacuum of time is immense. Is a swing towards the future the counterforce of performance? Vacuum-packed zen, unpacked and repacked, de-airing to preserve the time we have stopped.
At the far end of the auditorium, the installation Air Filtration is blowing in the wind. Press photos sewn on filter paper of significant and insignificant events in the world that are fading into oblivion. What is important? What is a monument? What is it that death releases into annihilation, what is our responsibility in raising awareness and remembering? The performance continues there. The wind and the tree are the performer.
