Alegría Gobeil

During the residency at Est-Nord-Est, Alegría Gobeil pursued research on suicidality in preparation for a performance presented at OFFTA. For many years, A’s work has involved behaviours considered self-destructive and control mechanisms that govern psychiatrized bodies. Now, A wants to explore the suicidal impulse as a complex desire for life. This research has given rise to an important shift in A’s practice. A’s performances are often based on an economy of means in which text is central, but the residency made it possible to develop a more elaborate scenography and to produce a series of objects that contribute to A’s reflection.

A’s performance proceeds through an accumulation of fictional and real narratives –suicidal individuals’ stories, medical theories, films, and literary fiction. In the residency bedroom-studio, this accumulation took a material form: the objects A produced functioned as “symptom-objects,” as A called them. We sat on the floor on either side of a row of twisted spoons, assembled in pairs and set into a groove in the floor. I didn’t know if we were protecting ourselves from something by putting this slightly deviant army before us. Perhaps a discussion that replayed the apparatus of medical anamnesis? In this case, who would ask the questions? Who would tell the stories? Who would be listening? The conversation advanced like A’s work: by branching out. One image led to another; one reference opened to many more. With the spoons, we moved from A’s older performances to the films of Chantal Ackermann and Lars von Trier, from family memories to theoretical essays, from literature to genetic medicine illustrations in which chromosomes mimic pairs of twisted spoons.

A showed me two big buckets at the back of the studio. One contained sugar-water; the other, bleach. On tables were spread the objects that A had dipped in these liquids. A bandage from a previous performance was in the process of crystallizing. Parking tickets had been whitened in the bleach and then split to hold sandblasted coins. The objects seemed almost to be swarming. And yet, the logic that linked them remained deeply conceptual. Many of them were associated with forms of expenditure or value: destroyed coins, twisted silver spoons, champagne corks, parking fines. Beneath this accumulation A was constructing a reflection on social class and on the criteria against which some lives are judged productive, viable, and therefore worthy of being preserved. A’s gestures were not feats of technical prowess; rather, they consisted of altering and ruining objects to expose the value systems that they convey.

The subjects that A addresses are weighty. Yet, something constantly resists gravity. A form of humour emerges – an obvious pleasure in complicating the too-simple stories. At the end of the performance, A explained, the floor is covered with bleach. The odour gradually becomes invasive, uncomfortable. Like many aspects of A’s work, this material is related to family memories that remain deliberately opaque. The odour of bleach, the deformed objects, and the tangled stories brought to life for an audience coexist with an energy, sometimes teasing, that keeps the work from being trapped in tragedy.