ENS Residency/ Painting Project
2019
The project started as an ENS Residency in Paris, February through March 2019. Out of a frustration with the lack of representation of black women and black bodies in institutional spaces and a desire to recall the commodification of nude bodies in the history of art, I performed an unscripted piece in collaboration with Kenza Jernite and Michael Getman.
In a large, unobstructed room, I hung several saline bags filled with blue, red, black and white tempera from the ceiling attached through fishing lines to various surfaces: white flour, bricks, my own body, and one connected to both clay and brick. I moved through an improvised choreography while paint dripped from the bags through lines tied to my body; my body became the medium through which the tempera reached and affected the surface. The floor becomes the living skin that shifts and builds as it moves. A reflective mirror covered by a mylar sheet held by another performer created different framings of the performance depending on its placement.
The project wanted to make clear that interdependence is latent within every experience. By tying the monofilaments to my body, I immediately created a tension on the wires that demanded not to be broken. This limited my movement to only the most honest, vulnerable gestures possible. My movements depended on the tension as much as the tension depended on me. It recalls the Buddhist concept of dependent origination: that everything arises dependant on other phenomena, as so therefore they cease to exist if the other does. The space of the performance (itself dependent on the physical and human space it inhabits) and my body co-existed in harmonious cooperation. The mirror and the dripping paint on the floor served as visual feedback for this act, enhancing and re-framing the work for myself and the audience.
Still moments became powerful. The mirror flattened the space and simultaneously gave depth to the composition. I slowly became one of the nude bodies, painting myself while revealing the Pollockian work below. I experienced sensations akin to being on a tightrope: exposed, cautious and very deliberate with every step. There was no room for elaboration independent of its effect on the space. The space that I built around myself – using every material at my disposal, from the flowing paint to the rigidity of bricks, from the smoothness of different fabrics to the granularity of earth – became a living organism that we can hear and see breathing. I am interested in trying to take that space to pieces, hanging bits of what was previously my own canvas into space, turning this previous living organism into a dead corpse, thus summoning painful memories of the American history but also granting that dead corpse a new life, maintaining the same spirit of cooperation latent in the performance.
Credits
Concept: Miriam Parker
Dramaturgy: Kenza Jernite
Installation: Miriam Parker
Performers: Michael Getman and Miriam Parker
