The story of your honesty and my vanishing body – fe(a)tus

11.5.2020 3 Tykkää 0 kommenttia Johanna Perttunen

Report about Nóri Varga’s one to one video chat performance/installation

Text: Nóri Varga

First of all, I would like to thank to all of you, who participated in the performance/installation, my colleagues and teachers who were supporting me. I was planning to create a video documentation using some parts of the performance recordings, but I have changed my mind, I decided to use more time for discussing about fe(a)tus with the participants and after releasing a video, what is inspired by the process, but not necessarily based on the performance.  fe(a)tus was an interactive, better say collective journey to the participant’s body perception and memory.

This one to one video-performance focused on the problem of private and public bodies. The performer invited the participants to take a virtual walk into the uncanny, into a human body, into our relationship to our bodies.

The performance was based on the fictive (delayed) thesis work of Nóra Varga on body images and on her sound art project exploring the socio-cultural presence of our public and private bodies.

The performance’s duration was 15 minutes per person. 

The performance’s soundscape uses a part from the poem scales, written and translated by the Hungarian poet, Eszter Kállay. She gave her permission to use her poem, for which I am very thankful to her.  fe(a)tus was performed 22 times during the week and had 25 participants. In fe(a)tus the participants had a chance to exchange some personal information, memory to the performer’s body parts.

1. How would you like to be touched?
2. What are you most proud of what you have inherited?
3. What are you most proud of about yourself? 
4. Please recall a moment when you felt yourself invincible!
5. What is the biggest challenge for you in your everyday life?
6. What is your earliest memory about your body?
7. Is there anything you would change about yourself? What is it?
8. If you were a model of nude photo series, with what background and context could you imagine it?
9. Please recall a childhood memory, what you could describe as the feeling of freedom?
10. Do you have anything in your mind you’d love to try, but your fear holds you back? What is it?
11.  Is there anything what you really hated about yourself earlier, but it changed and you started to love it? What is that?
12.  What was the most loosing-control-experience in your life?
13.  Please recall a joyful, intimate moment!
14.  What products do you try to control yourself with in your daily life (drugs, coffee, etc.)?