Fina Ferrara V. 2
- 6 hours ago
- 3 min read
Pig Nasty Cuino was a performance by Fina Ferrara during the era of the pandemic. ‘Cuino’ is a colloquial Spanish term which refers to someone as being dirty. Specifically, in Mexican Spanish, ‘cuino’ implies a person as being a slob or having indecent character. Pig Nasty Cuino is a performance about the excesses of oligarchy and greed. As a result, the series of performances are more relevant today because of the overreaching advancement of Big Tech during the era of artificial intelligence. Think of Beeple’s Regular Animals installation during Art Basel for example as a reference. A cynical portrayal and utter mockery of tech oligarchs in the form of robot dogs ‘pooping’ digital prints as souvenirs. In much of a similar spirit but a different manner as well as with more sophistication, Fina Ferrara’s Pig Nasty Cuino stages an elaborate banquet complete with various pork dishes to reference the ‘filth’ of the event.
In the introduction to the performance, Fina Ferrara guides the audiences towards her various assemblage and installation-based artworks made from recycled materials which make instances to several subjects particularly with obscenities about ‘shit’ and vomiting, such as Princesses Don’t Poop. One of the works in the exhibit was by the late Jose Luis Cendejas. During this act, along with the rest of the performance, Fina embodies the role of an egotistical arrogant artist who thinks they are “the shit of the world”, as she refers to as. Before dessert, the audience is directed towards a short film, a montage of gruesome, gory, and vulgar scenes from Hollywood movies assembled by filmmaker Raul Quintanilla. The intent being to instill a nauseating discomfort to the audience about their status as privileged guests.
The primary act of the performance entails a finale of Fina evocatively dancing and ‘menacing’ the elaborate dinner tables with various provocative moves. As she dances and emotes various gestures, such as eating in mania or moving her body in contortions, all to the rhythm of contemporary movements. Fina Ferrara’s dance represents a pure mania reflecting absurdity, sensuality, and disturbance. She intends to provoke the audience as they cannot take their eyes off her, she gets in their faces, dances inches from them while they are eating. The performance is an expression of excess, much like the immoderation of the elite and oligarchs. Fina conveys the irony of wealth as both a blessing and curse, removing one from the realities and harshness of the world. Her confrontations are meant to elicit a response.
Fina Ferrara’s audience in Pig Nasty Cuino are not aware her egotistical persona in the performance is an act, as she maintains character from introduction of the guests to the very conclusion. Such secrecy is meant to break the fourth wall in performance art and confuse the audience the difference between art and reality. The audience may not even be aware of the conceptual provocations intended in the performance. What Pig Nasty Cuino exemplifies would be breaking the barrier between perception and actual occurrence in art, as she embodies the essence of ego. The egotism reflects a disconnect from the problems and realities of the outside world encased in a spectacle dinner which questions the shielded character of privilege.
In essence, Fina Ferrara’s Pig Nasty Cuino is a statement about class division and disconnect between the privileged and the underclass. The performance seems to encourage those with access to be mindful of their surroundings. Don’t misunderstand the performance, as the piece is not intended to be an exercise in moral lecturing but rather a conceptual conveyance of how privilege and the status of oligarchy psychologically removes the human impact of relating to others outside their realm. Pig Nasty Cuino poignantly communicates the excessive and social isolating instances of wealth and status through provocative dance, the embodiment of the egotistical character isolated by privilege, and a staged interdisciplinary and integrative approach of incorporating film screening, and exhibition, and a macabre, lucid finale dinner to create an atmosphere of confinement. This elaborate dinner and event becomes an isolating entrapment of insularity, a conceptual provocation to have the viewers question the purpose of their social and class identity as well as their impact outside the imposed theatrical setting of the performance.
