Performance under the umbrella of Object Oriented Ontology
I just posted an interview with João Florêncio on Bad at Sports. I’ve included an excerpt below.
I met João Florêncio over the summer by accidental. I was a tourist at a SEPFEP, a philosophy conference in York. My boyfriend was presenting a paper and I happened to tag along — using up some free miles that must have accumulated with my parents’ help. While there, I wasn’t planning to visit any panels but nevertheless, I did. It was great. I had one of those brain infusions that sits with you for months and years, as your consciousness tries to digest what it has consumed. In particular, I got a crash course on feminism and learned more about Object Oriented Ontology — the subject of João’s presentation. He gave a paper about performance and how it might be considered as an object, a thing possessing its own autonomous being, a being not contingent on humanity. I wanted to ask him more questions on the subject and this seemed like a good opportunity. João is a Portuguese scholar currently based in London and researching on Contemporary European Philosophy and Performance Art. He is also an associated researcher of ‘Performance Matters.’
Caroline Picard: How do you think about performance?
João Florêncio: What first drove me to think about performance was my interest in what is generally known as ‘Performance Art’ (or its more British term ‘Live Art’). Despite having been both trained as a classical musician from an young age in a junior conservatoire and received my first degree in musicology, it was not until I discovered performance art that I started thinking about what it means to perform.
Anyhow, after a change of academic focus during my MA, I found myself enrolling on the PhD programme in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London, in order to carry out what would turn out to be a research project on a new ontology of performance. The reasons for that are varied but they can be summed up by an increased awareness on my part that ‘performance’ is a term that is increasingly used to describe the behaviour of various beings, from humans to computer networks, from national economies and stock markets to higher education institutions. Nevertheless, and despite some exceptions (here I’m thinking of theorist Jon McKenzie), Performance Studies, the academic field within which I’m working, hasn’t spent enough time trying to theorise those occasions of nonhuman performance; it suffers, in my view, from a certain humanist or anthropocentric malaise for reasons that I can point out, if you want. You can read the rest of the interview by going here.
Necropolis
Necropolis
By Mallory Gevaert
Slovenian writer Boris Pahor’s memoir, Necropolis (Dalkey Archive), is not an easy read. Holocaust stories rarely are, and still less the memoirs from that time. It is, however, a visceral account of his time spent as a prisoner-medic in Nazi camps, as well as some startling reflections sparked by his tour of a camp twenty years after the end of the war. Originally published in Slovenian in 1967, translated to English in 1995, and published in a handsome Dalkey Archive edition in 2010, Pahor’s story has been a long time coming, but it’s worth the wait. Necropolis is a memoir from a time when the Holocaust was barely a scabbed wound, and reminds us that we can’t let these events fade into history.
It’s hard to say why we read about the Holocaust; these books can’t alleviate guilt, or satisfy morbid fascination, placate us, or give us answers. But Pahor’s book, through its brutal and eventually desensitizing use of imagistic language, and the forward-looking ethos of the “present” of the book, manages to give the reader a sense of what the writer and prisoner’s situation entailed, and to inspire some thought on what still needs to change in the world community in the wake of these atrocities.
Pahor’s experiences are intriguing, both in his remembrances and in the “present” moment he speaks from in the book. Throughout the war, he is moved from camp to camp (how he comes to be at the camps is only lightly addressed). However, he becomes a prison camp medic very early in the war, through a chance encounter with a doctor that learns of his talent with languages. Pahor occupies a complicated and uncertain position at the camps; while he is a prisoner, he is also a somewhat valuable asset to his superiors and is treated much more kindly than other inmates. Tasked with helping patients who are regularly shipped off to die or pulled out of the hospital with broken bones and forced to continue working, his job quickly becomes a horror study. Despite all this, Pahor remains relatively safe; he is relieved and disgusted in equal measure at this unwarranted good fortune and does what he can for his patients. Most of the time it is not enough. His survivor’s guilt carries through to the present day, as he tours and reflects on his time at a camp in the Vosges Mountains.
Perhaps the most effective part of Pahor’s story is his use of imagistic language. His descriptions are almost painfully vivid, such as his account of entering a camp. He writes, “At the door your hand grabs trousers, jacket, undershirt, and clogs, so that your body can start the race up the steps. Move, move, a whip snaps across someone’s just-washed skin. Only the weakest remain inside, trembling as they try to pull their trousers on. Move, move, and yet you manage to stay in the steamy room a moment longer, prolonging the warm embrace as a few lingering drops fall from the showerheads like the last of your lifeblood” (33). As he shuttles between the present moment and the past trauma, the description remains clear, clean, and visceral in an almost clinical way, but also mixed with unexpectedly poetic moments.
Necropolis’s poetry is all the more unexpected when considered in light of its subject matter. In a book almost entirely comprised of distressing passages, the ones concerning Pahor’s guilt are perhaps the hardest to read. One heartrending scene involves Pahor trading a pack of cigarettes for a fellow prisoner’s piece of bread. He then attempts to rationalize his choice, even though he acknowledges that cigarettes will probably kill the other prisoner even faster than the Nazis would, and that the medics often get extra pieces of bread when their intended recipients die on the table. Yet his empty stomach (not as empty as some) and his need to give a fellow prisoner with some nicotine-based solace override his concerns. His reflections on that time are an almost never-ending chorus of if only, if only. For Pahor, his privileged position as a medic is only truly clear in hindsight, and he laments that fear-induced paralysis and numbness mostly prevented him from using his position to help more patients. In 1967, he is disheartened to see how lightly tourists regard his traumatic experience, but also gratified that they show so much life a scant 20 years after the fact. He recognizes the passage of time, but isn’t sure what it means for him: “Under the clear sunny sky these images become implausible, and I realize that our forced processions have moved into the unreal realm of the past forever” (33). What should he, as someone who survived those times, do with his knowledge?
In the end, Pahor longs to present his story to anyone who will listen in an attempt to foster the sort of global cooperation that, he believes, could have prevented the Holocaust from happening. At the end of his tour of the camp, he thinks. “I lie motionless on my bed, with no idea of how I will present the people of those dark barracks to these young things. How I will present those humiliated bones, those humiliated ashes” (182). The lingering sadness and appreciation for the human spirit that concludes Necropolis, assuredly, gets his point across.
Necropolis is available for purchase at The Paper Cave.
Artist talks from Irina Botea & Marianne Apostolides
Irina Botea & Marianne Apostolides
7-9:30 at The (New) Corpse Space 1511 N. Milwaukee 2nd Floor
March 13, 2012
Join us for an evening of artist talks from artist Irina Botea and writer Marianne Apostolides.
Over the past ten years Irina Botea has been engaged in an art practice that uses multiple media— digital video, film, video installation, performance, photography— to inspect the present socio-political dynamics and the possibility of their transformation. Her work combines reenactment strategies with auditions and elements of direct cinema and cinema verite to look into the role trauma, history, language, and music play in the formation of the individual and the community. Tonight she will show excerpts from a few of her films and discuss their genesis.
Marianne Apostolides is the author of four books, including the novels Swim and The Lucky Child. She is a recipient of the 2011 Chalmers Arts Fellowship, a prize awarded to artists in Canada, where she currently lives. Tonight she will read from her latest book, Voluptuous Pleasure, a collection of non-fiction narratives; she will situate this book in a wider discussion about the nature of non-fiction in our historical moment — a moment in which postmodernism is yielding to a new articulation of the human condition. Her talk is entitled Voluptuous Pleasure: The Creation of Non-fiction in a Posthuman Age.
Considering Evil
I came across this
A little bit about the origin of the species…
I finally wrote something about Georges Aperghis’ oratorio, Sextuor: L’origine des Espèces. I included the intro below!
“In the beginning, in the beginning, there was not a beginning. The common ancestor is unknown. Between each species and the common ancestor, who is unknown, one must seek, forever seek the intermediate forms” (Georges Aperghis, L’origin des espèces).
The performance took place inside a non-descript office building in Mid-town Manhattan. Despite the newish marble-clad lobby downstairs, the designated floor rested on creaking wood floors, that had been subdivided by drywall. Within an audible distance, someone sang scales and the outside wall of the theater (just opposite the elevator) was decorated with pairs of headshots — a before and after beneath which lay professional tag lines and phone numbers offering touch-up services. We had gathered in the corridor of what felt like a rehearsal studio — a realization that only added to the curiousness of what was to come: I mean, what would an opera about Darwin look like?
You can read the rest of the article by going here.