"Family poison la chambre"
Duration: 3 hours, 2005
Performed: June 11th, 2005
Exhibition: La galleria dell'amore/I.P.G., Galleria Civica di arte contemporanea Trento, Italy
Curator: Marina Abramovic
The entire exhibition had a structure of a house and my task was to create a bathroom... or a powder room. My concept was to make a space inside the gallery where people could theoretically use a real shower with real running water. But in reality I wanted all shapes and "bathroom concepts" to be turned around in this performance/installation, so I made the shower cabin very low and the shower curtain just high enough to cover the pubic area and nothing else. The shower curtains were not made out of plastic but out of very expensive velvet and were a couple of meters long so that the water I used to shower with would slowly flood the room. The performance is followed by a video projection of several intimate scenes in the bathroom, like washing your hands or chest and afterwards powdering yourself. The video shows reality and in the performance reality we see a non logic scene where the powder room doesn't function anymore. Instead, it has become a space of desolation. Every twenty minutes a song sung by Dolly Parton starts, entitled: "Release me" and is about a person who lost love and asks her/his partner to please let her/him love again. Instead of washing myself, I use a Christian Dior Shower gel and rub it on my chest as I pound it with my fist and constantly repeat: "release" or "release us" or "release me". The act is pathetic at first, but in time it becomes more and more hypnotic and the very strong smell of the perfumed shower gel fills the entire space. The gel on my chest never gets in touch with water so after punching that spot for a long time, it gets very irritated and resembles a kind of passion scene but in a very decadent occidental manner.