Acaso es esto una performance?
Is This a Performance? 90 Days of Silence and a Manifesto
We had just finished dinner at a small bar, tucked behind the Artium Museum in Vitoria. Claire Sobottke’s performance still had us intoxicated when I asked her:
Claire, do you have Instagram?
She looked at me and, with the faintest smile, replied:
No, Instagram makes me sad.Is this a performance? arises as a response to the tremor I felt that night. But it wasn’t until today, almost two months later, that I’ve been able to translate that jolt into whatever this is. Or, as Baricco once said, there is a moment when the painting falls. A specific, irreparable, irreversible moment. I suppose this writing was born from that blink of lucidity.
I’ve spent too many days, weeks, months repeating the same routine: alarm, wake up, wifi, social media. Any reasoning now seems too far-fetched to justify such disproportionate attention and dedication. This isn’t a habit, it’s a symptom of our time.
Within me, and within most people from a certain generation onward, there’s a techno-Pavlovian structure that’s as obvious as it is obscene. Is this a performance? intentionally transposes the present body, so central to performance art, into the space designated for the digitized body (imposed, forced, chosen?). I’m talking about an ontological and epistemological displacement of lived experience, and about questioning the very idea of the subject.
It’s a re-cognition of the relational and political structure that has historically existed between subject, message, medium, and technology, from the earliest writing systems to our current post-pandemic days. A structure that has swallowed us whole and cast us onto this seemingly inescapable techno-fascist shore.
This performance consists of uninstalling and eliminating social media from my life for 90 days, drawing reference from other processes of rehabilitation, healing, and rebirth, such as those found in agriculture or bone welding. It is by no means a promise, a challenge, or a heroic act. It’s a detox performed through some contemporary questions that touch on the positioning of the body, experience, and pain.
Reading authors like Walter Benjamin, Marshall McLuhan, and Byung-Chul Han has given me a space of strength and refuge over these past months, without which this action likely would never have taken root.
I accompany these 90 days of emptiness with a 13-point manifesto, which I hope resonates with those who also feel this void and present unease deep in their guts.
