Exorcizar es un verbo

performance
Centro de Arte Los Galpones, Caracas, 2019

Using Judith Butler’s idea of the verbal as gesture, and intending to “speak” from my body, I center the image of Joseph Merrick (1862-1890), an English character who became known as “The Elephant Man” for his severe and disabling deformities, who to survive had no choice but to sell himself to traveling exhibitions of “phenomena of nature” (freak shows) in Victorian England.

In the action, I lay down on the armrests of my electric wheelchair with my body uncovered and recited out loud a text of my authorship every time a participating spectator left a coin in a can placed for that purpose on the platform where My feet usually rest. Located in a cubicle in the living room, reminiscent of the penny gaffs where human oddities were displayed in yesteryear, four photos of Merrick naked or semi-nude were projected onto me and the rest of the items.

Are we back in the time of circus freak shows? Are we still in the era of difference as a spectacle? It will be remunerated to be illegible, inconceivable, all for a while by putting the body in front of the eyes of the common citizen, the common specimen, the one who grants permission to exist with a special talent visa. Until I speak and execute the non-conforming self, assumed avatar of the subhuman condition, of the threatening excess of the fractured, the crippled, the exceptional. Indocile I expose myself in the same place where the ancient heroes endured humiliations in exchange for coins of the lowest denomination.