In the context of RE_Formance performance art festival
June 5 - June 18, 2014 at Booze Cooperativa
Organised and curated by Contemporary Art Showcase Athens [C.A.S.A.]
Performers: Antigone Theodorou, Niki Analiti, Markella Kontaratou, Maria Limboura, Eleni Tsamadia, Johnny Rabbit
photos by Photoharrie & Nick Stathopoulos
The performance was a street ritual. I was interested in the multiple forms that a female body can take during the performance and the possible ways to include an animal in it. I invited a white rabbit symbol of fertility and the one that drove Alice into Wonderland.
The title of the performance is taken from this lacanian citation on libido “ Well! This is not very reassuring. But suppose it comes and envelopes your face while you are quietly asleep…I can’t see how we would not join battle with a being capable of these properties. But it would not be a very convenient battle. This lamella, this organ, whose characteristic is not to exist, but which is nevertheless an organ – I can give you more details as to its zoological place – is the libido. It is the libido, qua pure life instinct, that is to say, immortal life, irrepressible life, life that has need of no organ, simplified, indestructible life. It is precisely what is subtracted from the living being by virtue of the fact that it is subject to the cycle of sexed reproduction. And it is of this that all the forms of the objet a that can be enumerated are the representatives, the equivalents
In this deceivingly poetic description of the mythic creature called by Lacan “lamella” (which can vaguely be translated as “manlet,” a condensation of “man” and “omelet”). Lacan imagines lamella as a version of what Freud called “partial object”: a weird organ which is magically autonomized, surviving without a body whose organ it should have been, like a hand that wonders around alone in early Surrealist films, or like the smile in Alice in Wonderland that persists alone...