08.21.08 kulturnatib

Cestmoidazmikoni

This month is a busy month for me, performance art-wise. It could have been busier if not for two performances that, one, did not and, the other, will not push through.

Did not because communication from this performance artist whose event I was to join ended up in my email spam box. By the time I realized this, it was too late to pick up preparations I had set aside thinking that, not hearing back from her, she had decided against my performing. Not so, but it was too late to adequately prepare for that since I was already in the thick of preparations for another event where I was to do a performance art piece at.

The other one, scheduled for the end of the month, will not push through. At least not my participation. It wasn't all that sure to begin with actually. But now with one of the main groups organizing this in the throes of disbandment, the same group under whose aegis I performed last week, the most I can count on is to be invited as a guest.

Still, two performance art pieces within a week of each other is busy enough for me, especially since both have been quite challenging technically.

Cestmoidazmikno is my most recent performance art piece. The title is a fusion of words from French, English and Bisaya, which all mean the same thing: Me.

This, again, is a participative performance piece. This time about identity, which I found to be appropriate for an event that bills itself as a celebration of cultural diversity and brings together the growing immigrant communities in this city of Gatineau which, so far, has no organized Pinoy representation.

For this piece I used the medium of the portrait. Or, more exactly, the self-portrait. The myth of Narcissus must have its equivalent in all cultures. There is no portrait we love most than our own. Yet there is none that creates so much confusion, confabulation, consternation or protestation that, “I can't do it!”

The setting for my piece is that of a booth similar to that of many carnivals or fairs where one can appropriate another persona simply by sticking one's face through a hole of a painted or photo image where otherwise its face would be, and then have their picture taken.

My image used the different immigrant newspapers in the area to form the silhouette of a person. And I took through-the-hole 'portraits' with a camera look-alike box similarly wrapped in the same newspapers. For added effect a real camera's flash bulb provided illumination.

For some people this effect was real enough to make them doubt what they could plainly see was simply a corrugated box with a protruding cylinder with a visible picture of an eye at the inner end of it and without a lens at the front end.

The resulting 'picture' had, instead of their faces in the hole, a blank oval space where they would then, I instructed them, draw their self-portrait. At the bottom of the sheet was the congratulations, which they were allowed to see only after they were through drawing, “You have made your own self-portrait despite the image imposed or required of you by others; the media of your own community and that of the larger community. Or, have you?

Expectedly, this did not make the same sense for everybody. Reactions ranged from, “. . . “ to “ha?” to “hmm” to “aha” to “ha! clever!” Still, everybody simply enjoyed doing their faces, with the children spending the most time on theirs, still unencumbered, it seems, by the baggages of identity.