...girando

Eleonora Fabião’s Giro Piece is a dance performance, an installation, a scream claiming attention to the body immersed in present times. An awakening call to the body led by, and oppressed by, globalization. I’d like to embrace the idea of “flux”, which according to Mary Louise Pratt is one of the emblems of globalization, a multi-directional “free” flowing of information, products, bodies, and ideas. According to Pratt, this flux has become the official language of globalization, its modus movendi, its aesthetics and its charm. Eleonora mentions Pratt’s assertions in her spinning notes more than once. I feel it is important to keep Pratt in mind before introducing a description of the performance.

Globalization, performance, claustrophobia, dizziness.

The performance I am recalling started at six o’clock pm. The hour of the angel, my old nanny would have said. In front of La Galeria, a small art gallery in San Isidro, Lima, people started gathering shortly before five-thirty. Most of the people did not notice right away the big blue power generator standing there in the one parking space by the gallery’s entrance. Or, as I later found out during my conversations about the piece, the generator was noticed, but it was not taken as the first line of the performance’s dramaturgy. Some people even noticed the colored electric cables coming out of the machine and entering the gallery’s front door, like a red, blue and orange gigantic spaghetti, but most everyone simply took their time to smoke a cigarette, talk to friends and strangers who were attending the Hemispheric Institute third annual encuentro, and wait for the hour when all would be allowed to enter the space. Those with video cameras, and such, insisted upon entering before everyone to get a good shot of the space in advance – they didn’t know that there would be no electric power inside the gallery at that point.

At six, sharp, the artist came out. Her eyes were very peaceful, they seemed ready and confident. It took just a little while to catch people’s attention – “Hola. Hola. Hola.” And then: “Vamos a trabajar?” The murmur of conversation increasingly dissolved as Eleonora took herself toward the machine. She opens the control panel door, turns the generator on, giving birth to a loud artificial sound of engine. The sound of massive work, the sound of today. And a dark spit of black gasoline smoke came out of the top of the thing. My friend Jaime said “uau”. To me it resembled for a second a large ship, which is getting ready to gain the ocean and transport goods and peoples to other lands – trading ships being moved by propellers that spin inside the water.

After opening up all possible doors of the machine, making the noise of it as loud as possible, Eleonora enters the gallery, followed by a curious and impatient crowd. I was one of them. And although I had been there the night before for a rehearsal, and had helped setting up the space, I wanted to be in front and watch everything and everyone. For a second I knew nothing that was going to happen.

She turns on a light in the entrance corridor and walks to the room where one could see four television sets. In order to follow her, the audience had to tread on the gigantic electrical cables spaghetti. The cables connected the generator to the four TV sets and their VCRs. Slowly and followed by the crowd, she turns the first TV on. The screen is blue, and its light reflects on the white wall right across from it. The next screen will show a video, which has the artist as a subject. The third TV set shows a television news broadcast, and the last one, upside down, is connected to a camera outside the gallery sending live images of the working generator. At first one can also see the rest of the crowd trying to enter the space on this screen.

Eleonora walks back to the room’s doorway, takes off her shoes and starts spinning in silence. The spin is performed on the same axle, and its speed varies according to the amount of room allowed by the spectator’s flux.

At first, not everyone is able to see. Each person wants a peep; each one is waiting for the “performance” to start. Five minutes later, the artist is still spinning. From now on, the crowd will begin to move around the space.

Many were the ways I could notice people would experience the performance. Many spectators would stop to watch the videos. Some would stick to the video, as the performer’s spinning will make them sick. A man and a woman sat on the corner and stretched their bodies for a while; later I saw them talking very relaxed. Some of the spectators speak continuously, they laugh and have fun; others keep silent. The bodies around the performer will mostly move in a slow pace. Some will cross the space, touching her spinning. Many are afraid to move, or disturb her. Around me, friends would get together and inquire about nausea feeling, question what the performance was about. Some just nodded their head, as if perceiving a clue. A friend of mine speaks energetically as he remembers to hear the working generator: “this sound is amazing.” Some spectators will leave the gallery very early. Of these, a couple will play and perform to the camera outside, entering the gallery as images. Others will never move from Eleonora’s side and, ignoring the presence of TV sets, will keep watching her spin for as long as it takes.

And it takes twenty one minutes, uninterrupted, marked by an alarm clock on the floor. With the beep of the clock, Eleonora stops at once, and stands dizzy for a moment. She looks around in one more last slow spin. She looks. Her face and neck are humid from sweat, and I remember she had been moving for twenty minutes. She puts her shoes back on and walks out of the gallery. She turns the power generator off, creating darkness inside the room. Now with the city noises as a background, she shuts all of the machine doors and walks away, unbalanced, through the streets of Lima. Some people do not know what to do with this, and ask themselves: “Are we supposed to follow her, now?” Some do. Others stay, hoping that she will be back to receive applauses. She does not.

Today, and yesterday, and before: the planet Earth kept spinning around itself. This movement was complemented by another spin, this last one around the sun. Such spinning produces natural growth. It creates what we call the day and the night, as well as the environment that facilitates photosynthesis and oxygen selection. Such spin allows life. Hence the mouth, the tree, the juice, the skyscraper, the water, the train, the war, the theater, the flight, the plunge, the laughter, the dirt, the music, the gods.

Will it all keep on tomorrow?

According to Pratt, the neo-liberal flux of Globalization is not an exercise of freedom, or a liberating force, but rather naïve mobility. Such metaphor of the “flux” keeps one away from the notion of directionality, thus becoming a reactionary and uncritical concept. The dynamics of fluidity in our context challenges even the force of gravity, one that is inherent to everything that has a body, i.e., a force that is pertaining to all that is human. The lack of gravity seems to point to the lack of ethics in neo-liberal flux.

In such a historical moment, how can an artist make her truth come to an audience?

Environmental art, the blurring between spectator and performer.

By describing Giro Piece, I feel I have many things to talk about. The act of describing it gave me the conscience of its plurality; it presented itself to me as an experience of many facets. Like Hélio Oiticica, Eleonora Fabião provided us with an environment, not a work to be watched. There is no spectator. The bodies inside and outside the gallery became the material with which the artist finished her environment. The last layer of paint on the walls. We were not watching, but participating in an action that was collective. There was no stage, and no central performative action to follow. Besides the spinning body of the performer, there were four sets of television, each with a different performance being offered. I cannot simply write about the “performance”, when in fact we were faced with so many of them.

Eleonora displaced the central nucleus, or energy center, of the performance to a collective movement. This movement was not thought out; I would dare say it passed unnoticed by many. In her spinning notes written during the process of creation, which I had access to, Eleonora states very clearly that she will not have spectators, but coworkers. It is in fact her only words in the starting point: “Shall we work?” This is an invitation, it implies a negotiation of collective work, and such negotiation is done once you accept to follow her inside the space. From now on, each one becomes a limb in the functioning of the performance.

Her spinning, like in many rituals, serves as a connecting tool; it is a field of energy pointing to all directions, connecting the earth to the sky, all the different bodies around to each other, the spaces inside the gallery to the world outside. That is a power characteristic of all ritual spinning: to connect energetic fields. Now, such ritual action has two facets: in times it harmonizes, other it serves as disturbance tool.

For a moment, her spinning suddenly connected our being in Lima to discuss Globalization, Migration and the Public Sphere to the general globalized economic movement that produced the need for that conference in the first place. Besides that, her action also disturbed biological functions within the bodies of certain members of the audience. In an environmental performance such as this, it was the spinning body that connected all the different perceptions taking place at the same time. It was like this that the artist’s body then became a power plant, which produced not [only] electrical power, but also different perceptions of space, color, smell, different perceptions of a live act – like in Lygia Clark’s propositions for experiencing inner selves, Eleonora’s Giro environment provided us the possibility of a “vivência”, a subjective exercise of being alive and “working”.

Her body acted like a gear to a clock. If one would like to point to a representational function to her action, which alone would narrow the reading of this performance, it would be that of a machine. The spinning of the gearings in front of us, as we hear the soundtrack of a factory, the music of an engine, and smell the steam and smoke of burnt fuel.

Borrowing Pratt’s thoughts about the flux, I would say Eleonora’s performance acts both as a representation and a critique of such concept. As it illustrates the confusing plurality of postmodern focus and movement, its harmful and imprisoning naïve mobility, it also creates a space for the exercise of one’s freedom as spectator. It is not a loose action, unfocused – I find it rather concrete and palpable, but also plural, large and unlimited. This performance is the emblem of all that is unclassifiable, it holds within itself the paradoxes of our historical moment. It affirms itself as a performance by negating divisions of performer and audience. It reaches far beyond vision as it presents itself as an invisible object – the body never stops, my eyes can never rest on her body because it won’t allow me a still vision. The spin illustrates infinity, but it also acknowledges the closed limits between her body and my own body. It speaks to me because it is not preaching. It’s meaningful because it is open. It becomes a performance not because it is watched, but because it is lived.

It tells me something. Live dizziness. Or, rather, realize dizziness.

("Globalization and Transculturation”, Keynote Address given by Mary Louise Pratt (Stanford, USA) on July 8, 2002, for the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics’ Tercer Encuentro Annual in Lima, Peru)