Mädchen Vivi V. 3
Updated: 2 days ago
Hell is Here, and Sometimes I Rest Upon It is a two-part performance directed and performed by Mädchen Vivi. The performance conveys the concept of hell as a resting place to ruminate and liberate the self from the patriarchy.
Consisting of two separately performed acts, Hell is Here, and Sometimes I Rest Upon It consists of Mädchen Vivi essentially in a hell-like safe-room ‘making love’ to a cigarette and a second part of Fedra Morini performing the same act within the display case of a store. The second part has Mädchen Vivi’s performance displayed on a complimentary screen to act as a sister of solidarity with Fedra Morini. Hell is Here, and Sometimes I Rest Upon It is in collaboration with O_Mag, curators Greta Voeller and Camilla Giaccio, and Una Vetrina Gallery.
With Mädchen Vivi’s primary performance of herself within the hell saferoom, the act consists of her lying on the floor taking deep drags off a cigarette. The focus then turns to her various body parts, such as her hips and feet. Mädchen’s boots have aggressive long spikes on them and appear to be a specialty item or custom-made. She plays with the cigarette against her boots and hips, at one point even putting out the cigarette on the boots. There seems to be flashing scenes of dress-like textiles in red and the safe-room has ominous glows of red lights tinting the performance as a hell-like scape. During both segments of the performance with both Mädchen Vivi and Fedra Morini, the actors seem to liberate themselves through the cigarette and embrace their hell-like existence, with slight convulsions towards to end as a sign of slow bodily rejection.
What Hell is Here, and Sometimes I Rest Upon It conveys is both a narrative and an anti-narrative. Enhanced by the provocative texts of Sandra Cane’s Glass Is an Estrogen. Or Metaphors of Exhausted Desire (pamphlet curated by Klim Kutsevskyy), the performance has a narrative of treating hell as a plane of liberation. The female essence becomes casted into hell through the constant patriarchal gaze and she is to use her experiences to assert confidence into herself. We can interpret performance as signaling to embrace reality or to evolve through the experience in order to create liberation. Anti-narrative elements within the performance proper are non-linear actions which communicates these acts as more performance art rather than traditional theatre.
The red-tinted safe-room and red-draped store display case combined with sensual cigarette smoking borders on voyeurism infused with a sense of disturbance, as the situation becomes clear these excessive puffs are a coping mechanism with trauma, specifically through the constant judging gaze of male eyes. This sense of embracing hell for either empowerment or escape reveals a constructed scene of a Hades-like realm which offers wisdom and enlightenment, a fall of Icarus, and perhaps, a rejection of the heavens.
