A text by Anthony Dominguez (Mouvement)

Story of a thrown rock

Whereas the performers of the sixties tried to bring together art and life, placing the human body at the center of artistic practices ( let's think of Anna Halprin, Allan Kaprow, Gutai, the Viennese Actionnists, etc.), the nineties somehow marked the end of a systematic belief in this absolute power of presence. From Jerome Bel to Meg Stuart, from Alain Buffard to Gisele Vienne, the body is regularly presented, in this beginning of the century, as an interrogative tool of its own limits, its own insufficiency to manifest life through its own 'mise en scene'. Is it enough to be alive in order to manifest the reality of life? Aren't environment and context, as they influence us, also part of this state of life? A proposition of manifest clarity, Throwing Rocks, performance by Franziska Aigner and Gabriel Schenker, tries to develop a connate reasoning that one could write down this way: I am the consciousness of myself as well as my environment.
Divided in four parts, the act involves bodies whose face -- first identity vehicle -- is most of the time hidden, invisible, inscribing from the very start the spectator in a strong relation to bodily materiality. First the purpose focuses on showing how the body is molded through intentional movements, given orders. Indeed, Franziska Aigner, posting in a split bending over chest and back to us, is activating and isolating the muscles of her legs on a drum set solo. These multiple impulses, underlined by a soundtrack which brings better readability, are as many metaphors of the ambiguous will of Human beings to define themselves at the same time as they are looking for themselves (trying to identify, to define oneself is indeed a constitutive part of identity itself). Thus, this body takes shape as the performer orders to activate this or that limb, testifying the great mastery and awareness the human being can acquire over its own materiality. Between the different tableaux that compose the work, lights systematically switch off before the performers move, another witness of their will of depersonalization which orients the audience towards a perspective anchored into flesh, not in the being (they try to erase, to sieve as much as they can any conspicuous mark of personality).

The rock is effectively thrown in the second tableau. This one presents the performers in a ball-shape, a heap of compressed material, as they start a random path, rolling according to gravity, tensions, impulsions and a balanced precariousness. This confrontation of will and environment, as well as confrontation to the other raises the question of identification on the level of denial, in a very political register; In other words: How does identity take shape in the denial of the other? (It's not by chance that the performance has notably been made under Xavier Le Roy's coaching). The following tableau, if slightly weaker than the others, constitutes still a rather fluid transition to one of the most interesting ending points, in particular through the taking back of the form of the first part and the process of the second one. Indeed, the two performers are now next to each other, facing back, with their legs spread and their feet touching each other. As they start anew this work on the muscle as "individuality", as limb (which is necessarily part of a "whole", at least of a totality), they make perception oscillate between the sensing of unity and the desperate attempt that puts us in front of two distinct entities that will never match. They will never be one despite their will to constitute a globality. Shortening of the focal distance, sliding, from the outside of the rock to the inside, the performance ends with a video presenting Franziska Aigner and Gabriel Schenker one after the other in a box, which is manipulated from the outside. The onboard camera, fixed, presents some petrified bodies where only some body parts are brought in movement through the interaction of gravity. May that be one's sex, the other's breasts, or even their hair, the motivity of the bodily elements detaches itself from the intentionality in order to be subjected to laws of attraction, laws of environment, hoisting the identification problematic beyond the political aspect previously evoked, or the political relation we have more or less consciously with the surrounding context.
A proposition of an open system, Throwing Rocks participates in the questioning of what is identity in regard to social relations as well as environment. Declension of propositions uttered by people like Xavier Le Roy or Jerome Bel ("What is the importance of representation to each one of us? What is the process in place in each representation? Identification, distancing, denial. I would like to insist, make these data conscious."), the performance interrogates identification through the means of self quotation, of denial, and also loss and absence of control. This kind of research, attached to localization concerns, takes part in the will of many contemporary artists to come up with a cartography of Human being's humanity. The credit of Throwing Rocks is to join this reflection around the notion of definition with the processes that are activated to reach it. The desecration of a body that doesn't manage to present the real is not a fatalism, and Franziska Aigner and Gabriel Schenker prove it with a rich and problematic however very readable proposition of obvious enthusiasm and curiosity.