four exercises of despair

The more privatized the psyche, the less it is stimulated, and the more difficult it is for us to feel or to express feeling.

from Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man, 1974

The spectacle of my own pain and (anti)heroism is strictly reserved for my beloved ones. Why? I am not a Protestant, nor do I come from an exhibitionist culture of public confession, like Anglo-America. I am an ex-Catholic pagan, and I only write or make art about myself when I am completely sure that the biographical paradigm intersects with larger social and cultural issues.

from Guillermo Gómez-Peña, La Migrant Life, 1999

Communication in communicative capitalism joins together the communicative equivalence of contributions with the inequality of their network value. Rather than a setting where a speaker delivers a message to a hearer who has to first consider matters of intent and intelligibility (why is she telling me this and does it make sense ?), communicative capitalism is one where messages are contributions to a circulating flow of inputs. As contributions, messages are communicatively equivalent; their content, meaning, and intent is irrelevant. Yet this equivalence is accompanied by dynamic hierarchies and real inequality, a contradiction perhaps best expressed as “some contributions are more equal than others”-because of their links.

from Jodi Dean, The Communist Horizon, 2012

“Four exercises of despair” explores the ways in which personal narratives, autobiographical accounts, confession and public statements can work within information flows, as overused but inexhaustible sources and sites for political identificatory relations, neoliberal identity formations and universalizing expressive articulations. In a matrix of angst, denial and banal emotionalism, potential monologues emerge as exercises of communal despair, a seemingly all too common and familiar social and political atmosphere of uncertainty, fear and powerlessness. The piece is composed of a score (divided into four parts) and its performative interpretation, a stage (PVC flooring, microphone, amplifier), and a set of four teleprompters (smartphone screens) fixed into the walls of the exhibition space.

The score traces neoliberal corporealities that arise through abstract conceptual izations of the “body” circulating in public discourse. The physical body is always already mediated through sensation and expression, psychological and physical distress, always implicated in language and articulated through language. The myth of expressiveness, the outcry or the outburst of emotion as a means for the body to realize itself and break free from “inner” constrains is here explored through detrimental linguistic formulations that promise directness, a true and unmediated communication of emotion, a direct exchange of innermost truths and individual feelings. Truisms and examples of everyday direct speech, of simplistic poeticism but undeniable strength, examine the ways in which “overworked” language can still carry emotional weight. Against the backdrop of socio-political and financial distress, emotion challenges through language’s circulation the limits of its “readability”.

In its manner of composition, through a homogenization of various first person narrations to the extent of making them untraceable, the score brings together contemporary autobiographical accounts from political figures such as the self proclaimed “responsible capitalist” Gina Miller or the alt-right activist Cody Wilson, to theatrical monologues, manifestos and sociological material coming from opposite political fronts, erasing positionality towards a commercialized abstraction of distress, exhaustion and despair. The biographical is understood here as a site of multiple identifications, open to appropriation, misreading and disambiguation, but also as a site of false commonality and alliance.

In its performative articulation, the score works as an actor’s exercise on endurance, memory and breathing. Composed in an asthmatic manner of loosely connected words, phrases and sentences, it presents a certain resistance to its memorization. Classically trained actor Joanna Chloe Voulgari uses a specific technique of script memorization and delivery (deriving from orthodox chanting), that employs repetition, breath regulation and monotonal pronunciation to “embody” the text. The performance consists of the actor’s repetitive rehearsal of the script as a set of exercises (a full-body workout), to produce emotional responses between compassion and over-identification.