The performances of Natalie Fyfe actually do not focus on the face alone but on our mouth as the stage where actually happens everything that makes us human – the food is being chewed, the language (sound) is being created, and we are being connected with others via words or touch. In Choreography of the Mouth-Nil by Mouth, the mouth performs (the whole face except the mouth is in a fetishist way covered with a mask) a choreography which almost, just as in Shakespeare's As you like it, brings us to different ages of our life: to the scream which brought us to life, to the infant, to the lover and to our animalistic side which is with us all the time. In Bite, Chew, Spit the artist creates the intimate space of a ritual by masticated chewing gums. The small „chewed sculptures“ form the circles in the exhibition space, where they actually become an „archaeology of the mouth.“ In a metaphorical way, Katerina Sidorova focuses on the object as the centre point of a performance. „The object“ are
the unbaked clay vessels where anonymous performers are pouring water in silence, until naturally, clay either craks or is dissolved by water. In this performance the actual human body, the body of the performer, becomes insignificant, because it is being aligned with the material which it is concentrated on – clay. The stage becomes the place for human and civilizational disappearance, the stage where a historical analogy of human physical body and clay as the protomaterial stand together side by side in „ashes to ashes“, „dust to dust.“ The vessels loose shape, just like an old human, in the seventh stage of his life, in the last scene of all, where only mere oblivion remains, Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.
Text: Neva Lukić
photos: Anke van den Berg