The word “perfo-catalizador”/ “perfocatalyst” is a linguistic condensation

of “performance” and “catalyst”. 

I directed the performers according with two meanings of “catalyst” (4): “a substance that causes or accelerates a chemical reaction without itself being affected”; “a person or thing that precipitates an event or change”. But personally, I prefer this another meaning that highlights the quantity and speed (5): “a substance that increases the rate of a chemical reaction without itself suffering any permanent chemical change”. Nevertheless, If the performer suffered a permanent change I cannot tell yet.

        THE IMPACT OF A PERFORMATIVE INSTALLATION

To cook is to transform something onto an attractive product to eat. In art we cook artworks to be culturally significative. We cook to share. This may take time and there´s also different stages of cooking, like precook. Even each paragraph of this text may be considered as a recipe and together would be part of a paper. A group of texts would be part of a bigger recipe like a book, more than the sum of the parts. Metaphors help us to reach our long-term goals, make them accessible and enjoy them.

Las guerras púdicas in 2019 was exhibited as a performative installation in “Magnet room”, a rectangle of 27 m long x 6, 80 m wide (acoustic ceiling height: 3,95 m). It was composed by 4 stations. The performance that transformed the installation was developed in three days, three performatic activations were carried out.

Each station was cooked as a recipe with multiple elements that were constructed step by step until I decided the final shape. The way the elements were distributed in the space was in part previously planned and in part it was determined in the montage or assemble. This is because I believe the shape may be projected but never completed outside from the space where it is installed. As the texture of a pudding will absolutely change according to the cake pan and the temperature oven. With "mold" or “space” I mean not only the physical dimensions but also the cultural or institutional norms that contains certain shapes. For instance, I reached an agreement with the institution to intervine a panel with an action painting called "Perfosentimiento" (Feeling performance).

I proposed a first stage of experimentation where we spent long hours testing the capacity of materials, a second stage where I proposed certain “shapes” where we needed to arrive in living performance and a final stage of montage for the exhibition. The shape is a condensed product of heterogeneity. Please keep reading to find out about my method of composition.

             SYMBOLIC COOK AND “CANTIDAD NECESARIA” (NECESSARY AMOUNT)

I have an extend background in psychoanalysis. Since I started to read when I was young and a later when I entered the university in 1998, I have always asked myself why people usually keep so separated theory or language from practice. When I have studied enough psychoanalysis, I found out a word to describe this social mechanism more properly: dissociation. It might refer to keep aside body requirements if you are a devoted intellectual person. In the other hand, if you are devoted to body, commonly dissociation might induce you to reject study. Maybe this is a too simple way to understand the concept but in everyday practice is how it works, and I think that if you take some distance, you can observe it.  

In 2016 I travelled to Vienna to take some workshops at the ImPuls Tanz Dance Festival and there I found a book that resonated with my interest. I underlined this phrase: “Every act of dancing is a negotiation with the patterns your body is thinking” (6). I had written a novel and I had ended with a backpain. I presented a performance about how a writer would not forget that she/he has a body. (7)

I realized that indeed there was a cultural practice that gave some guidance about how to do things, but that it wasn´t a rigid theory because it needed to be checked in experience: the cultural practice of cooking. I noticed that in my grandmother’s recipes was common to find something like this: “flour: necessary amount”. Which was the “necessary amount”? How to know that?

This notion of “cantidad necesaria/necessary amount” comes from Mrs Petrona de Gandulfo (8). This resonated with my training since the concept of quantity was taken by Freud from science it to the theory and the clinic of the unconscious drive. Whether in art or in life, the issue of how much we give and whether we give it all together or distributed is key. (9)

So, I decided that cooking was a great metaphor to compose, and I took some tools from it like the four steps. Firstly, determine the ingredients carefully or decide to cook with what you have. A recipe may need symbolic and physics elements in different proportions. Even a sensation or a memory could be an ingredient. Secondly do the batter, the way you mix the ingredients may affect the result. With the same ingredients you can do a pie or a cake, a painting or a sculpture. The union of ingredients may materialize different fields of knowledge, that may be important forward. In third place, cook it or freeze it. Give it time and consistence. Take some distance, look at it again. Take out what is left and let it repose. Finally, taste it and share it. Different fields involved might be some clues about the guests. Receive some feedback about the shape and start a new recipe.

       Conclusions                                             about theory and practice

Different ways of treating material evoked, developed or even suggested concepts to me. I believe that the spirit of playfulness  allowed me to find concepts more than the intention of visualize them. But this is a delicate issue because it is not a simple copy and paste to fill the gap between theory and practice. Based on my research, I believe that integration of fields makes easy the approach of theory and practice. This is one of the potentials of the hybrid field of Performance art, a possible answer to a dissociated context from its own value.

One wide way to considerer performance art is as a nexus  that takes different amounts of knowledge in different proportions and articulate them to create new beginnings. But maybe It is not that one day I woke up and say I would do an artwork to integrate fields. It was more like a pulse of research was leading me onto different fields and that I used my tools to frame my interest. In this work, anger, shame and modest were simultaneously object and subject, as it´s common in a certain type of artistic research. (10) Probably here´s the hope of keep visualizing the relation between performance and everyday life, between performance and the structure of desire.

Certainly there´s a long forward work to do in inter-fields communities and I hope like to continue squeezing and increasing the knowledge derived from this experience. Maybe Performance Studies could shelter these trans disciplinaries perspectives. Thinking across boundaries is not always working together with intellectuals from different fields, but more likely to find the interdiscipline in me, to develop and integrate the different belongings I have been collecting.

I have always rejected eclecticism because from my point of view I believe it really doesn´t have a shape. I believe more in the creation of curated integrations, measuring through performance art the necessary amount and style. And still, I need to find how these terms differ from each other and when they are functioning as a field or maybe as a tool: contemporary art, psychoanalysis, culinary art, synoptic chart or rational thinking.

At this point maybe the reader would like me to mention something about the language of war. There are different ways that flow to the meaning of war in this work, from feminism to reenactment, from unconscious conflict to cold intellectual war. But the most important point maybe is the division of strategy and tactics that has been like a compass that has oriented my work. Strategy for me is like the equivalent to the steps of cooking. Tactic the concrete actions to adapt the strategy to the multiple resistance this project was forced to deal with.

Nowadays to cook contemporary products have become an action where body is committed even when it seems not to be present. This text has been created in the concernment about how artists are going to redefine and care their practice due to what a body could really sustain in a vulnerable world.

       PERFO-CATALYSTS                                                                                AND THE RESPONSIBILITY OF THE SHAPE

The first work in progress of this research was exhibited in 2017 at Andreani Foundation through a 20-minute performance called “Bebés de gelatina” (Jelly babies). There I performed with fabrics around the theme of transformation. My concernment in that moment was how body shape changed according on the space where body sticked, rolled or just stayed quiet. Fabrics allowed me to follow and record the shapes.

Simultaneously, I did a series of photographs about an experimentation with jelly and different surfaces. I submitted onto experimentation 7 jellies for 9 days. I won´t go deep on this here but I must tell this material was selected because of its flexibility, brightness and other features capable of stimulating endorphins.

In 2018 I started a Master’s in Theater and Performance art at the National University of Arts in the city of Buenos Aires where I knew four of the five performers (3) that later I invited to catalyze my project “Las guerras púdicas” (Modest wars). I arrived to the word “perfo-catalizador” (perfo-catalyst) to describe the role of body in creative process.  

           Case analysis 

 Las guerras púdicas or LGP  (Modest wars) has been one of the three projects selected by PIPA Bold Project in 2019 to do a residency and exhibition at Haunter Foundation in the city of Buenos Aires. In this text I will use this performative installation as a case to explain my method of composition.