Slow Hunting, Alex Mari, conceptual performance + video documentation with Yellow Fish Durational Performance Art Festival, 2021-2022.
In this year-long itinerary, originally researched and performed with the Yellow Fish Durational Performance Art Festival VI in NYC, SLOW HUNTING underwent 3 phases of development: The Gaze, The Hunt, and The Retreat. Each phase sought to investigate and dishevel the corrupt, conditioned foundations of our desire. Through a fantastical narrative of “removing the libidinal device,” Alex Mari examines the processes of desire first through scheduled online observations morphed into video art, accumulative site-specific followings in NYC (the impact of their spectacle and their residual phantom tracings), and finally through a manifested removal of the libidinal organ itself in order to create space for “something new.”
It seems our desires have become a convulsive criss-crossing in search of one another. But what is the meaning of this almost invisible movement?
Love…
Desire…?
For a community that is as absolutely real as it is absent? Is it something...newer, that attracts the beings by ripping them from their ordinary society? Old vital organs cast out - the heart, gaze, thought, waste or breath - to find emerging desires, new forms of associating and dissociating from a majority technology in which we are
… t r a p p e d.
THE GAZE//
Observations:
Five people consented to being watched online via their own camera/computer. They were presented with the following requests and were offered the opportunity to negotiate:
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Preferably you are alone
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Set up the camera in a main living space and leave it there for the duration of the observation
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Audio is optional
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Time is between 1 hour and 24 hours (Zoom preferable)
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My camera may or may not be on
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Documentation will occur
These 5 videos were then layered and romanticized with the intent of confronting desire’s replacement of reality with details of a subliminal fantasy. Each video intends to discuss:
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“a shattering of the world”
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scopophilia (curiosity/control)
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hybrid bodies/images
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exchange of fragmentation of identities
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witnessing and awareness of self/other
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becoming-invisible
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a permanent revolution of the gaze
TRAPPED
THE HUNT//
Accumulative, site-specific followings:
Over the course of 10 days, random strangers were followed in New York City for a total of 1 hour per day. Each day’s following was recorded and mapped. The previous day’s following was re-traced in exact detail before the new following began, i.e., Day 3 started by retracing Day 1, then Day 2 so that the new following began where the previous day ended. This made space for an expected routine with the allowance for unpredictability during the last hour of every day. Each new hour-long following was live streamed on Instagram Live.
On the eleventh day all 10 followings were retraced without a subsequent following. A camera crew was hired to follow me on this day. This created a haunted habitat tracking of all the cohesive wanderings - existing at some inflection point between the strangers’ absence and presence.
//In addition to the followings, I adhered to a raw diet to build onto a fantastical narrative of self-transformation while temporarily tracking the lives of everyday people. I also created a progressively irritating prosthetic rash around the eyes - a sort of chemical burn born from the spectacle of following other’s desires. What trickster is responsible for taking the vulnerable organ that holds the device of our current flawed, forced and colonized desire?
THE RETREAT//
Dissections:
Here, I bring back a sculptural manifestation of the cast-out, transparent organ with the potential of removing its corrupted libidinal device.
Back from the nonsense of observing and following social function, the danger of a body without vital organs is the ability to replace it with a new foundation.
Without the webbed systems that infiltrate our capitalistic desire of consumption: food, sex, money, drugs, material possessions, experiences, infiinite oportunistic connections, the need for more and better; what is left? This now empty and yet irrevocably complete space represents a return to self, a preservation of the new body.
