Mortar & Pestle

Project Description:

This project is a meditation on our personal and communal tendencies to refine ourselves – to violently sand-away blemishes in pursuit of perfection as if it were attainable. In 1967, filmmaker Fredrick Wiseman released a documentary entitled Titicut Follies. The film showcased the lives and struggles of patient-inmates of the Bridgewater State Hospital for the criminally insane, as well as the horrific conditions in which they lived. It was there that inmates were force-fed through rubber tubing, required to strip naked publically, and taunted by the institution’s staff. Using this historic case study as a launching point, we are creating an interdisciplinary performance that brings together sculpture, body-based performance practice, elements of ritual and composed sound in which we too will be chiseled away until no blemish remains. Our process has involved a series of performative and aesthetic exercises intended to redefine the human body as both a material and site for creation. Through this process of improvisation we have developed a laundry list of images and gestures that are being used as source material for larger compositions. In contrast to Wiseman’s tale of oppression and captivity, we have chosen to stage this work outside of the institution and will perform in the streets for all to see. The work will begin 30 minutes prior to the evening showcase and will trace the periphery of the building’s exterior in a series aesthetically provocative images involving wood, water, sawdust, dentures, and mild doses of electricity to the head and mouth. By subjecting ourselves to similar acts of abuse and “correction” in public, we aim to make a spectacle of things hidden – to ask a question that has long since been ignored, and to suggest a different way of doing things – must we be refined?