Moscow Museum of Modern Art, 2010
created and performed by Carlos Soto and Charles Chemin
texts Henri Michaux and Pier Paolo Pasolini
music Johann Sebastian Bach, Blue Sabbath Black Cheer, Pillars of Fire, Carlos Soto
duration 40 minutes
PIG PIG PIG attempts a new vocabulary of violence, broaching the unspeakable: absence, solitude, the monstrous, anger, horror and pleasure, the very brutality of being--myths supporting otherness; an oppositional otherness, making language and sex attacks on a falsely tolerant society. Incantatory texts intone a melancholy foreboding of a body no longer idyllic but base merchandise; the body as garbage.
Applying the formal practice of writing to our bodies—akin to the literary experiments of Henri Michaux or later passages by Pier Paolo Pasolini, both of whose texts we utlize in the work--we begin from movements that speak without expressing detectable or rational (thus, narrative) discourse, exploring elements of variation and erasure as they would be applied in a textual manner. We are one being split into two halves, good and bad—approaching an aesthetic of revision, fragmentation, doubling. This corrupted speech intones a new vocabulary of violence. Citation, quotation, pastiche, parody, analogy, repetition, rhyme are a means to dislocate the spectator out of a fictional logic, toward otherness. Language does not represent, it cites. It repeats. As the two sole performers, we attempt to erase ourselves within the work in order to approach being ‘other’, thereby achieving a form of contamination, of perversion of self.
presented in the frame of L’Année France-Russie, with the generous support of CulturesFrance. Developed with the support of Point Ephémère - Centre de dynamiques artistiques, Paris.
photographs © Aram Haus
self-portrait as Mr. Plume, 2010