on the Politics of Presence - Nicholas Grafia & Mikołaj Sobczak
Excerpt from: Exh. Cat. »Lines of Passage«, Galleria Giovanni Bonelli, May 27 - July 10, 2021, Milan.
Subversive Iterations
In the performance Rooms (2020), the phrase "You know who is who", ambivalently vocalized ist at once a statement and question. It condenses this creeping feeling that often arises in their performances. As if gaining a glimpse into the subconscious of history itself, characters emerge in the two performers, mutants from history, mythology and religious tales, with references to entertainment business and pop culture, uneasily familiar and yet alien. Agents of the past take possession of the artists’ bodies, acts of violence are hinted, power relations are negotiated, and ideologies pass by as the winds of a nightmare-dream. Arises the impression that the individual body contains all of these potential identities, only temporarily noticeable, that transform after a few minutes into someone else.
With a sympathetic but emotionally uninvolved tone, with the body covered by a sacred-looking cotton banner, adorned by an eye of Providence, Nicholas announces: "Last week, Sunday 10 pm, it was me and my dog observing a murder from my balcony." The phrase recalls an observer, present but lacking any impulse to act, other than to mediatize it, streaming it live to a spontaneous virtual audience. As he continues, the performance weaves colonial acts, monarchical hierarchies, religious rituals, media spectacles, and recent political events into a single unsettling scene. With the murder of over 12.000 Filipinos, under the guise of a "war on drugs," President Rodrigo Duterte effortlessly inserts himself into this showcased stream of events of the transhistorical yearning for the power to subjugate. The somber, dragging soundtrack, which often contrasts with Mikołaj's high-pitched singing voice, reinforces the impression of witnessing a human tragedy.
Even positive phrases carry a heavy undertone that makes them readable as the creed of a society that escapes into passive privacy and assumes voyeurism as a replacement for existence: "The word freedom is the only one, that still excites me. Freedom is the only thing that is capable of sustaining the old human fanaticism." The characters cannot be divided into perpetrators or victims, they remain at a distance making it difficult to develop a level of sympathy. Even when sentences appear that make a certain identification unescapable, as shallow reflections delivered with a profound expression,spread the discomfort of facing a mirror. The statement "Everytime I meet with my friends for a coffee, we realize, that the values of our parents are not our values" is delivered in an exaggeratedly serious voice and accompanied by a series of symbolic photo and selfie gestures. The structure of these speech-acts builds up like a web of conventions.
Jacques Derrida pointed out as early as 1972 that performative speech-acts only function because they cite a convention, meaning they represent repetitions. In the further development of performativity theories beyond the sphere of linguistics, it was Judith Butler who, with the lens of gender studies, from 1991 onwards, explained gender identity as the result of a socially produced, performative utterance, which is also structured by (compulsive) repetitions. , Through a performative understanding and the awareness of social roles as re-enactments, gradual mutations of repetition become a space for action. In the performance Rooms such spaces open up between the recited fragments, subverting the messages presented and establishing the act of repetition as a subversive strategy.
(Excerpt)