9. Parallel Practices: Joan Jonas & Gina Pane

https://issuu.com/thecamh/docs/2013_parallel_practices

In Pane’s own statement Letter to a Stranger, she criticized our modern society that is deceasing and depriving us of our ‘material/spiritual’ instinct. The language of body is deployed and domesticated into entertainment, ‘giving the individual the illusion of freedom while in reality society alienated him, transforming one’s psychomotor potential into a force of productivity’ (Pane).

This system formats our body in favor of meeting the normative demands of its functioning. In such conditions, our body is constructed socially, and in Pane’s works, exposing and denouncing it and using the body to reclaim our psyche clearly fits in her agenda.

Silence- words being empty of their meaning- being used as images obeying the structural law of languages, while body itself is a form of writing in search of the other (the viewers who constitute the works).

‘I open my body you can see your blood therein.’

‘the language of body as the language of female’

The performer’s body (’my’ body) is inevitably united with viewers’ (the Other’s) body, during which viewers’ position is not only there to witness but to complement. 

8. Princess Studies: Fantasy, labour and Happiness, 2015

Eisa Jocson, 

Princess Studies: Fantasy, labour and Happiness, 2015

Performance 

Parasite Gallery, HK

Princess Studies is part of Eisa’s project ‘Happyland’. Ironically enough, the name ‘Happyland’ which always refers to Disneyland is also the name of the slum area in Manila where the artist was born. In HK Disneyland for example, a large number of the Philippines actors/dancers are employed for the format performance repeatedly put on in the theme park, mostly excluded from the main roles from these Disney characters, which is obviously reserved for certain racial profiles.

Parody, mimicry and reproduction is used on two bodies, in the end of the performance, they lift their dresses and revealed their bodies: now it’s clearer, it’s clearer that this is not Snow White, this is not white. 

An interesting side story is, in 2018, this piece was performed at RAM Shanghai, after the artist talk, in Q&A session, a Chinese audience came across a question: the role itself is a white character, it be strange if the actor who plays it is from another race, in a way as it be strange if a white actress plays Mulan. Is your work over-interpret this matter? The moderator didn’t even translate to the artist but directly asked back, ‘then, does a white performer get paid more than a Philippines performer?’

7. Mourning Diary, 1977-1979

Barthes, Roland, Howard, Richard, and Leger, Nathalie. Mourning Diary : October 26, 1977-September 15, 1979. 1st American ed. New York: Hill and Wang, 2010.Mourning Diary,

Mourning for a mother, or a father takes 18 months. These ‘chaotic’ short notes were written down on paper slips in ink, or pencil. What interested me is how Barthes refused to call it mourning but suffering, that his distresses resisted to adapt into what Butler would say ’transformation’. 

What interested me is the beginning of it. After the first night of mourning, there came a repudiation after another repudiation, suggesting that the precondition to open up the process of mourning is 'knowing the body', knowing a body that is sick, knowing a body that is dying. The conversation was staged in a great dramatic tension.