2007, ORGANIC LIFE, Europe - Asia. Mediations, KC Zamek, Poznań

BERGAMOT GROUP

ORGANIC LIFE

Performance
2007
Europe - Asia. Mediations, KC Zamek, Poznań, Poland

20 min

The man covered the woman's face by pulling her skirt over her head, thus depriving her of visibility and emphasizing her vulnerability and objectification. He then poured handfuls of small coins drawn from his own pockets into her tights. When some of the coins spilled out onto the floor, he carefully collected them and dropped them back into her pantyhose.

This ritual of mechanically filling her body with money had a distinctly material, almost violent character. The woman's pantyhose - was turned into a kind of money bag, and her body into a container of purely economic value. The gesture can be read as a commentary on the commercialization of the female body and the economic relations inherent in gender relations.

In the next part of the action, a man led a woman - still deprived of the ability to see - toward the audience and began to urge the gathered to throw change into her pantyhose. For the most part, the audience responded to the appeal and actually began to throw in coins. In this way, the audience became an active participant in the performance, co-responsible for its meaning.

The performance exposed the mechanisms of complicity and indifference in the face of objectification: showing how easily the act of symbolic exploitation can be encouraged when it is framed in a seemingly innocent performance. After going around the room and collecting money, the man led the woman outside - still laden with coins and out of sight - encapsulating the image of a captive, controlled body being transferred from public to private space, from the place of performance to the place of exclusion.