Oppressed

This was my reperformance piece. I was inspired by a piece I happened across on Youtube, called Oprimidos by a Spanish artist named Adrian Martinez, which you can see above. In his piece, he wraps himself in metal wire to signify the restriction felt by LGBT people. Oprimidos means "Oppressed ones" in Spanish. I can summarize and translate his artist statement for this piece as follows: 

Oprimidos is a piece of videoart that is a metaphor for the collective oppression felt by LGBT people. Just like barbed wire on a wall, Adrian Martinez is immobilized by his sexuality, a feeling shared by many people in the world. When one steps outside the "social norm" of hetrosexuality, they are immediately faced with brutal oppression and can feel immobilized, just as the artist has done in his piece.

Martinez only has this piece as a short video in which we see him in front of the camera, wrapped in wire and wearing a nude cap. I was very inspired by this metaphor and decided to work with it and make it my own. For first performance of the piece, done in class, I kept the title (translated) as Oppressed. Later on, for our final Live Art Night, I altered the piece even more and changed the title to Bound, which I will discuss in a future post.

For Oppressed, I acquired a long length of metal wire and, with the help of an assistant, tied myself to a stool and completely tangled myself in the wire. I was totally immobilized. I was stripped down to my underwear, exposing myself to the audience on more than an emotional level. They could see the wire digging into my skin. I taped my mouth shut with packing tape. I placed myself in a completely dark closet. A very small, confined space, and had one weak light in the corner illuminating me. Only a few audience members could fit in the space at once, so they came continuously in and out, spending as much time in the room with me as they wanted. While they were in the room, I struggled to free myself from the wires, but in vain. All the wile, I took safety precautions by having an assistant with wire cutters close by and a safe word in case I needed to be freed immediately. The wire was very tight and the more I struggled, the more it dug into my skin and the more tangled I got. As the audience was in the room, I had to take breaks from my struggles, collapsing with exhaustion. This was not acting, as I was genuinely exhausted from trying to free myself and also the pain of the wire digging into my skin. I have included a picture below of my performance and included a picture of some of the "residue" left by the wire on my skin. With the wire wrapped around my neck, I was really in few of suffocating at a few points and had to stop struggling.

Overall, I was very happy with this piece. The response from the class was wonderful. Everyone in the class had at least one comment to make. It was all positive, however everyone mentioned how powerful it was, to the point of being disturbing. Very disturbing. I included a trigger/ content warning before the performance, as I recognize this could trigger bad thoughts or memories for certain people. But that was certainly my intention. I was very moved by this performance and knew I wanted to continue to mold it into something greater for Live Art Night, and I did exactly that.