Journey of Aspiration
Right of Admission was initiated as a site specific performance, deliberately conceptualized to fit in within the class and race stratification system of Johannesburg. When we decided to move this piece to Venice for the biennale, our goal was to reflect on the subtleties of this new and vexed space. Subsequently, our formalistic decisions shifted, although the concept and the themes remained intact. The nuances of the audience and the radically different expectations of that new audience, insisted that the piece adapt so that the integrity of its intention as a site specific artwork remained intact. The Venice Biennale is an arena purpose built for spectacles. And the new questions of how our body would be read in a city, comfortable in it own narrow expectations of racial classification provoked a resistance to amuse. Our resistance to fulfill this expectancy led to the performance intervening into this anticipation of the spectacular, based on our sense that blackness in Venice, is read as either: migrant worker or upper class traveller. The absence of black faces except as hawkers, selling logoed counterfeit designer handbags, led us to interrogate this lack of visibility through an intervention into Venice as a hyper-Art-Fair and as a tourist destination. The crowds at Venice operate simultaneously as art consumers, art producers and as touristic audience, all, ourselves, included aid and abet the city’s success as a destination. And during our “Journey of Aspiration” to Venice, we wanted to “break” this culture, which feeds the expectation of the spectacular by doing what is most unspectacular: walking and grooming.
Tellingly, walking through the crowds at the Biennale, clad in “nude” long dresses, gleaming straightened hair, golden jewelry and bedaubed in make-up, which flattened our features, we still amused. Walking through Venice, whilst enacting entirely unspectacular actions: grooming ourselves, applying and removing make-up, cleansing ourselves, we still became a spectacle.
Tellingly, walking through the crowds at the Biennale, clad in “nude” long dresses, gleaming straightened hair, golden jewelry and bedaubed in make-up, which flattened our features, we still amused. Walking through Venice, whilst enacting entirely unspectacular actions: grooming ourselves, applying and removing make-up, cleansing ourselves, we still became a spectacle.
