UNDERmy-your-ourSKIN performed at Satellite Art Show, Miami Art Week 2021. © Quinn Dukes
I had many doubts about living/performing UNDERmy-your-ourSKIN back to back, from New York to Miami, less than two weeks apart…
Is a repetition based on modularity still a repetition?
What type of memories remains in a space populated by granular body agents?
Are the prelude and prologue of live art a condition of a none performative liveness?
A live art research inside Miami Art Fair is an interesting model to explore. Bodies in motion with individual and collective agendas map the relationship between creation as a religion and capitalism as a moral contract.
When a city acts as a medium and the mediator, the different architectures under its societal injunctions segregate bodies in different sonic and textile functions.
“Being among” or "belonging" to a space is more important than the hierarchy of tribalism.
The space is the identity and the people the DNA of the moment of the event.
Time is the measurement of what is left and what is still for the taking.
Between noise, light and cocktails, capitalism is performing a variation of humanity’s despair, searching for dopamine and desire before extinction. The "golden calf" was a syndrome; now, it is a system.
It is short, brutal and primal but wrapped into fashionable behaviour and rules of engagement; the orgy appears to be civil and serves agendas and debacles.
In this context, movement is superior compared to memory. It has to be 'fast' and not 'last', until next year.
The arbitrary violence dictated by time and space creates and maintains the necessary distance between anonymous bodies, famous faces, and those who can offer both.
The ephemeral nature of liveness is a chimère invoking and evoking inside/outside/around modular space and granular people.
Repetition that doesn't exist is needed to survive the hygiene of capitalism.
Granular body agents erase everything with their presence, but they keep artefacts of the void because of their potential value.
Prelude (welcome the audience) and prologue (say goodbye) are the fundamental elements of the performance; what is in between is life, banal and unique.
Inside this artificial reality, the only factor of liveness is the audience. Their voices and bodies have to bury the performative nature of art. Therefore the audience is a never-ending rhizome and the artist an ephemeral space and time.
PS: many thanks to Quinn Duke and Peformance Is Alive for their support.