PERFORMANCE DIARY: 8:10 THE EMBRACE
The contact lenses made my vision camp as if stuck in a fog that would then evolve into something else, as if I was in the middle of a milky enchanted world. Except that I couldn’t leave my spot. My vision expanded slowly as the hours went by. I could notice the smallest things, movements, shifts of spatial, temporal and vibrational matter yet, at the same time, it felt as if everything had slowed down to a strange pace. Sometimes I would notice slow-motion facial micro movements of the audience staring at Loretta and I asking myself if my brain had forced itself to slow down radically due to the challenging enduring act. I have only then realized that having sight positioned me not as solely object/objectified, but gave me the power to exercise my own gaze. I think that rendered this whole act powerful for black bodies like ours.
The lighting in the space took such a striking presence with those eyes as if one was experiencing a sunset in extreme slow motion noticing the light travel across the room, the sun beams dancing through bodies, objects, pieces of art and invisible beings, completely unnoticed. I could see quite far in the room, my sight evolving almost supernaturally. I watched the birds in the glass or hard plastic roof sit and fly around as if undecided of their own destiny. They kept us a distant type of company.
The first hours of this long durational act were the hardest. The brain is like a monkey radio going through so many quick stages and thought processes attempting to settle down. It takes every kind of distraction as entertainment, despite our decisiveness to focus on this eternal embrace we ought to do. That’s when the body moves the most even if we were intentionally slow and present in our movements. The body incites an incessant quest to find comfort never really finding it for too long. As I was just writing, in the first hours, it never ceases to seek some kind of comfort.
I found a lot of comfort in the arms of Loretta at first. The embrace felt a bit of an extended high that would fade and reignite on its own. The mind wishes to entertain eternally even in this simple state, so I made myself aware of how I was feeling and executing this embrace. I was investigating how my body was speaking through that embrace. Many questions crossed my mind:
Is intimacy provoked?
Provoking?
Is intimacy intentional or random?
Is intimacy temporal?
Is [black] intimacy political?
The mind drifted again.
I tried not to ask any questions regarding time. I wanted to forget time.
Boredom came surprisingly quick. It was only for a moment. Perhaps it was more annoyance than boredom. The audience would enact the same type of conduct having the same reactions. I was taken aback by some of the same bodies returning several times to watch us. They would fall into taking hundreds of photos. I could follow their motions into posting on social media, their framing, their caption-writing, their mumbling voices. Sometimes I’d spot someone I knew and that would get me excited to watch them. It was not the same type of voyeurism between the audience and us due to our inflicted slow pace, we could perceive vast worlds from simple actions/movements/shifts around the room. I have listened carefully to the artist talks on the other side of the exhibition. That was the only clearly audible thing I could listen to in that space. Everything else felt like muffled voices.
The cold stone grew hard and I felt embodying that cool hardness and becoming more and more stoic.
Loretta fell asleep. I was incredibly surprised by her ease into letting herself let go like that. I think I was even envious if I am honest. I was so curious about this ease that I would never be able to non-perform. I remembered how just the day before, how I felt asleep at the exhibition space I would be performing in a few hours and surprised myself with an ease that is not natural to me. I was quite exhausted and needed to be rested for a demanding performance that day and since I didn’t have my rented room anymore available to me, I have just melted in a quite comfortable black chair. People thought it was a performance and took several photographs of me on their phones. My friend and work partner did exactly the same a few meters away from me letting herself melt away in a similar chair. I have seen some other people take photographs of her too and whisper mumbling sentences in Danish. I laughed and just let myself go. I would hear their whispers in my almost-dream state and my friend shared the same experience. Our third working companion documented this unstaged non performance of exhaustion and then we saw the videos she shot from the curious visitors convinced that we were doing a real durational performance art piece. I was too exhausted to care. Yet, I wouldn’t let myself sleep during this performance. I have never tried such a thing: sleep-performances! Many would ask, what is the difference? Well, one intentionally decides to sleep as a performative act, and since that was not part of my intention for this performance I couldn't really just do it even though my body was aching for sleep. Even if I would have decided such a thing, it wouldn’t be so easy to do it. Sleep is such a vulnerable thing to carry as one lets go of consciousness into subconsciousness being left at the mercy of the space surrounding you. The already high vulnerability of that act of sitting in an eternal embrace with someone else stranger to me was quite demanding with such high stakes.
Returning to Loretta falling asleep in my arms brought an interesting challenge that I haven’t foreseen. In one way, it leveled up that space of intimacy to its highest point, since I felt that her ability to sleep in my arms meant that she trusted me even though she had never seen me before that day, and in the other, it positioned me in a role of… the caretaker/watcher. Interestingly, that would define most positions of our bodies and that would be translated into how others would read us. I would be the carrier/embracer for most of the time, and her as the embraced. I would carry her body weight and keep it lifted and regal as much as I could as I had a feeling that if I let her body fall down the embrace would have been broken, or that she would look somehow absent or dead even (which made me laugh imagining how that would look like). I felt that if I’d drop her, this act would look and feel clumsy and therefore unintentional. In the first hours of feeling her falling asleep in my arms, I had a childlike curiosity to all the textures and shifts and transformative scales of her falling asleep in my arms, inside of that installation with water, in which she would sometimes let her foot fall into the water dropping yet, being watched by so many white faces. I was curious about what that carrying was doing to the space and to our dynamic . I was curious about the peaks of this intentional intimacy being created in that space while so many other things were happening at once.
I would hold her body tight, pressing her urgently to keep herself awake. She understood my cues but would fall asleep again. I saw it with humor until I got seriously triggered by this immense anger. I guess it was the turn of my tiredness to speak. Memories of my childhood assaulted my mind with images of me not being a child but an adult trapped inside a child’s body worried about errands and domestic chores, and being the second-mom-dad of our home in Lisbon. A child that strived on keeping shit together at home for the sake of my siblings and my parents. Holding Loretta’s body infuriated me at some point as her body would become heavier or perhaps I would grow tired and feel her body weighing four times more than her normal weight. The curiosity was still there but the anger inflamed deeper as I was seeing her as a child that I had to take care of, not being able to ever let go of. That rendered the claustrophobic aspect of sitting inside such a constricted space quite intensively. There was tension now. It made the performance more interesting in my eyes. I accepted that role that came with a certain kind of aesthetic of keeping me sitting upwards, preoccupied, attentive, engaged with the audience and really present.
I would not forget that I needed her to be there with me, present in that embrace, so I would keep trying to shake her up or press her skin hard to make her feel. As the hours went by, I felt that my body and hers, our skin were merging so I could feel her deep sleep being transferred to my body and my eyes grew heavy, the eyelids closing down, the shoulders giving up. I was too hypervigilant to sleep even though certain parts of my body were already numb falling slowly towards the ground. The cold had probably kept me awake. I was shaking now even though I had never touched the water before.
Our poses would change slowly at an almost similar pace. The rage earlier moved into deep sadness, a morose vast grief that would translate into slow-paced waters. I felt this urge to cry and release this grief . I waited for its entrance knowing that it would come uninvited. I allowed it to have space with the same curiosity as anger did. I knew they wore the same face.
Grief made me feel old, as if I carried my body in this new world for thousands of years. I would feel my face raise wrinkles, and my body crawl down slowly.
Loretta's awakened in the last two hours (probably, it is hard to tell exactly) and I was happy to have her back a bit more present. I could finally allow myself to be the embraced too and to let go of holding things tight. You know, control. I could relax my body and let it fall over hers. I was relieved that I could allow myself such a treat. I felt the warmth of her tight embrace and was able to breathe deeply. It was here perhaps that I connected to the warmth of my mother’s womb memories or something even more ancestral. The carrying of my body and soul by benevolent ancestors that show up to guide us at times. I could feel this extreme feeling of highness and pleasurable sensations in my back, as if rain was massaging my skin softly. There was a quiet joy here that summoned that early sadness. How lavish it was!
When Miles came to open the top of that glass-cube installation, it took me some seconds to fully understand that he was there releasing us from that embrace. It felt strange to come back to the normal world as enduring that performative act affected all my bodies (flesh, metaphysical, socially constructed etc). It felt unnatural then to gain my normal sight again. I have gotten used to the milky vision and to the warmth of Loretta’s body. I had no awareness of time so I couldn’t really tell how long we had been there, but it felt as if we were missing two or three more hours . I could have stayed for five hours longer or even more.
There are probably even more metaphysical aspects of this performance I don’t have access to right now that I could channel and write about, but I will stop here and continue another time if it makes sense.
Long durational performance-diary entry post-performance for Miles Greenberg’s The Embrace:8:10 performed at Enter Art Fair curated by Irene Campolmi in 2020 and performed with Loretta
