Performatorium - Day 4

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WE WALK WITH ZOMBIES DOWN THE PRIM ROSE PATH BY MARTIN O'BRIEN AND SHEREE ROSE AND THE GHOST OF BOB FLANAGAN ASSISTED BY JEFFREY VALLANCE

The entanglement of a community is often rooted in a use of similar language and meaning; a trust of shared understanding and knowledge. For Sheree Rose and Martin O’Brien, performance has meant taking personal practices and activities around S&M out of the bedroom and into the wider world, extending its meaning from the privacy of being among other enthusiasts and inviting others in the public to consider the ways that marginalized bodies, in this case sick with cystic fibrosis, can have agency over illness; to be sick the way a person wants to be sick by pushing and embracing heightened experiences around symptoms. 

Three shallow graves, mounds of dirt covered in cut roses, laid out on the floor of the gallery space. In true spectacle form, the artists were summoned from the dead, displacing dirt and worming their ways out of their graves. Together they explored the extremes of the body's ability to feel and experience through hands-on actions with the body of Martin O'Brien. The extreme sense of the visceral created parasympathy in the bodies of audience members; an unintentional participation in the inability to breathe, the feeling of hands pounding the chest, choking/coughing up phlegm into jars, using implements such as clamps on the naked body.

By enacting these complex ways of being with sickness through durational performance, the artists highlighted the political relationship with the world that is inherent in having a marginalized body, and the possibilities of choice and meaning that exist therein.

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