Peeping Tom La Visita
Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia 4–7 November
Surrounded by three white gallery walls, a cleaning lady sits on a stool, controlling a revolving circular white platform from afar with a remote. After a few minutes, picking up a cloth and spray from her trolley, she walks over to said platform and wipes it clean before mounting it. As she proceeds to morph into a variety of elegant poses reminiscent of Graecoroman sculptures, it rotates her slowly so she can be observed from all angles, almost like a work of art herself.
This is the opening scene of La Visita, a new site-specific work created by Gabriela Carrizo, cofounder of Belgian dance company Peeping Tom, for Collezione Maramotti.
The performance follows a loose storyline in which a ‘visitor’ arrives in the space to discover a selection of artworks from Collezione Maramotti’s permanent collection. As the audience follows her between rooms, what initially seems like a simple gallery tour soon descends into a surreal and at times unnerving journey, in which the lines between the human performers – a mixture of Peeping Tom dancers and cleaning and security sta from the venue – and the artworks on display are blurred.
Towards the beginning of the piece, for example, ‘the visitor’ enters a white cube space that’s home to Italian artist Claudio Parmiggiani’s Caspar David Friedrich (1989): a large black boatlike sculpture suspended from the ceiling and dripping dark, oillike liquid onto the floor (the final detail added especially for the performance). After observing it for a few moments, she also starts bizarrely leaking black fluid – perhaps an act of extreme empathy – which trickles down her leg, staining her previously spotless cream skirt.
Other episodes in which ‘the visitor’ respectively deflates and inflates like a balloon and is entirely wrapped up in clingfilm by a gallery staer don’t seem to correspond directly to specific artworks but are engaging and comical nonetheless. Their humorous nature also contrasts darker elements of
La Visita’s eccentric narrative: there’s a subplot in which one sharply dressed character, who appears to be the gallery director, systematically removes all the paintings – replicas of actual works – from the walls and gathers them together on a trolley. Many are smudged and blurred, as if they have been scrubbed away, and a chorus of groans and cries make it seem as if they are sentient and in pain.
The director herself, who has paint splatters up her arm and face, is the obvious culprit. Back hunched, feet skipping and shuing, she pushes the trolley animalistically around the gallery, gesturing upwards as if calling on some deity to aid her activities. She meets some resistance, however, from a security guard whom she discovers sensually kissing a copy of Francesco Hayez’s Meditation on the History of Italy (1850) that she wants to add to her bounty. After a strained tug of war that the director wins, the guard descends into a heartbroken, depressive spiral, eventually brandishing a gun to shoot at a portrait that, in turn, starts bleeding from its forehead.
This series of events, and the whole performance, concludes with the audience being shepherded by security guards downstairs into the foyer. There, through glass windows, the gallery director and guards can be seen burning a whole host of paintings in a firepit. While this seemingly alludes to themes of censorship and the systematic erasure of perceived ‘degenerate’ culture in totalitarian regimes, I am left thinking about individuals in positions of power in the arts, and the influence they have on what gets seen, what doesn’t and the impact this has on collective notions of culture.
While presenting contemporary dance in gallery spaces is nothing new, La Visita feels pioneering not only in the boldness of its theatricality and characterisation – most dance works I’ve seen in galleries have tended towards abstraction – but also in wholeheartedly embracing visual art as an inspiration for movement and as a performative companion. When I interviewed British choreographer Siobhan Davies about her work in galleries in 2019, she was very careful not to talk about dance ‘relating’ to visual art, suggesting that the term denotes a hierarchy between artforms. It’s an understandable sentiment: for years dance has been seen as a lesser cousin to other disciplines, not least music, and many choreographers have worked hard for it to be viewed on its own terms. Yet there’s no doubt about which artform is calling the shots in La Visita, which uses and abuses – and even eradicates – the artworks it features for its own ends.
Emily May