to (un)mark
Botticelli’s four-panel cycle of Nastagio degli Onesti, a tale lifted from Boccaccio’s Decameron, depicts a brutal and chilling parable of male violence and coercion against women. Nastagio traps a woman to marry him by staging an eternal punishment of another woman, forever chased, slain, and gutted by a knight.
This almost reads as a meta-narrative of patriarchy: women can only keep “safe” from “bad men” by seeking the protection of a “good man.” Between Scylla and Charybdis, women are forever objectified as men’s personal belongings.
Carolina Bianchi begins her performance, CADELA FORÇA TRILOGY – Chapter I: The Bride and The Goodnight Cinderella, with Botticelli’s four-panel paining. This live performance constitutes part of her Dantean journey through the history of rape and femicide, as well as a restless inquiry into the nature of performance art itself. A decade after being drugged and assaulted, Bianchi now took a dose of “Goodnight Cinderella”, a Brazilian date-rape drug, onstage.
When Bianchi was still sombre, she gave us a lecture revisiting the femicide happened in history, especially those involving female artists. The central figure is Italian artist Pippa Bacca. Bacca, together with her collaborator Silvia Moro, took a live performance in 2008. They dressed as brides and tried to make a trip from Milan to Jerusalem by crossing the Balkans all the way through hitchhike. However, when they were near the skirt of Istanbul, Moro refused to hop on a car because she didn’t feel safe. Bacca insisted so the pair parted. In a forest, Bacca was raped, strangled, and later found slaughtered. Other female artists are woven into Bianchi’s query, including Abramović and her Rhythm 0, Tania Bruguer and her Self-Sabotage, and Ana Mendieta’s She Got Love and her fatal fall from the 34th floor – anecdotally at the hands of her husband.
Why femicide? Why rape? Why female performance artists? To seek answers, Bianchi crawled onto her desk, falling asleep, leaving us to witness what would happen to her, live. In Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture, Philip Auslander has defined that the nature of performance art relies on its physical and temporal, unmediated co-presence of the performers and the audience. Erika Fischer-Lichte later emphasised in her The Transformative Power of Performance that immateriality, disappearance and impermanence became key ideas around performance art.
That is to say, what they describe as unmarked, unarchivable liveness that constitutes the nature of performance art, stands in starkest contrast to the very nature of rape and femicide, which is deeply marked, viscerally embodied, and ultimately ontological. In the second half, one of performers used a real penis-shaped camera to penetrate Bianchi’s vagina. We, the audience, witnessed how that penis was moved inside. We witnessed that raw, cruel ontology. In this world, there is perhaps no gap more immense, more irreconcilable, between the ontological, embodied experiences of living through rape, than all its epistemological recounting.
Auslander proposes to study the relationship between unmarked liveness and recount-able archives as knowledge as historical and contingent, not as something of ontologically differentiated. But when it comes to rape and femicide, such a discussion feels unbearably weightless. Other performances, for instance, those documented through NT Live, might indeed be theorised this way, but is it the same thing to witness Bianchi got raped onstage, and to watch its archive? The most irreconcilable and controversial fact about live performance that stages rape is that, on one hand, compared to fiction or spoken drama, which frames rape into social justice, legal improvement, and other discursive narratives, live performance art confronts the act’s ontological markedness where socio-cultural discourses cannot operate upon. On the other hand, performance art’s very ephemerality, its non-ontological existence, is thrown into the most violent contrast with rape’s irreducible embodiment.
Furthermore, this is also inseparable from women’s sense of self, their crushed subjectivity. For Lacan, the subject is always a traumatised subject: for the default male subject, trauma is the forever-lost objet petit a in the Oedipal triangle of daddy–mommy–me. But what of the female subject? Is women’s collective originary trauma the fate narrated in Nastagio degli Onesti, either to be hunted, raped, and slaughtered, or else to become an object easily yielded to another man in order to avoid such a fate? Is it the marked trauma of womanhood itself? Is it why Bianchi yelled, “Fuck Catharsis”? Because just like the forever lost objet petit a, there is simply just no way to, ontologically, unmark that trauma.
In What The Body Cost, Jane Blocker argues that it is the desire for presence that constitutes part of the written history. Thus she views documentation in a position of absolute desire. Perhaps that could also be Bianchi’s positionality. It would be deeply unsettling and troubling to say that her performance is to “cure and purify” like a therapy session. But maybe, just maybe, her performance is about being absolutely ephemeral in performance, and absolutely marked in the history and documentation of rape and femicide.