Call Me Text, Just Text*

ABSTRACT

This text introduces and discusses the MOVIMENTO HO (HO MOVEMENT), a collective action conceived by Brazilian performance artist Eleonora Fabião and realized November 2016 in Rio de Janeiro. Performed by 4,700 bricks, 3 books, a group of 7 artists-collaborators, gallery visitors, the cultural center’s staff, a truck and moving workers, among others, the action started at Centro Municipal de Arte Hélio Oiticica (Municipal Art Center Hélio Oiticica, located in downtown Rio) and ended in front of the Casa das Mulheres da Maré (Women’s House at Maré, located in one of the city’s major conglomerates of slums). During 7 days people, bricks, books, and truck, among others, moved one another through varied spaces, tangible and affective matters, and performative dimensions.

Notes

¹ Elsewhere I wrote on performative programs: “I call this compositional procedure ‘program’ inspired by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s use of the word in their famous essay November 28, 1947: How Do You Make Yourself a Body Without Organs? In that text, the authors suggest that the program is the ‘motor of experimentation’. A program is a motor of experimentation because its practice creates body and relations between bodies; it activates affective and poetic circulations that were unthinkable before the program’s formulation and realization; it triggers negotiations of belongingness; it de-naturalizes everything that is touched by it. A program is a motor of psychophysical and political experimentation. Or, to quote a word so dear to Hannah Arendt’s political and theoretical project, programs are initiatives. Very objectively, the program is the performance’s enunciation: a set of previously stipulated actions, clearly articulated and conceptually polished, that will be carried out by the performer, by the public, or by both without any previous rehearsal. In other words, the program’s temporality is very different from that of the show, of the rehearsal, of improvisation, of choreography. … It is the program/enunciation that makes possible, orientates, and moves experimentation. I propose that the more clear and concise the enunciation is, the more fluid the experimentation will be” (Fabião, 2013).

² Oiticica (1968), pp. 26–27 (this and the following translations are mine).

³ Oiticica (2009), p. 108.

⁴ Barad (2012), p. 16.

⁵ Actions (2015) was co-edited with André Lepecki. Besides my writings and several images, Actions is composed of articles by Barbara Browning, Pablo Assumpção B. Costa, Adrian Heathfield, André Lepecki, Felipe Ribeiro, Tania Rivera and Diana Taylor. For more information access http://www.eleonorafabiao.com.br/index_en.html

⁶ RIVERA, Tania (2015). For an ethics of the strange. In: ACTIONS Eleonora Fabião. eds. E. Fabião and A. Lepecki, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: Tamanduá Editora, p. 294.

⁷ In the back side of the entrance wall there was a text also titled, “What Moves the HO MOVEMENT?” Written by me as a kind of “artist statement,” the curators suggested it should be displayed. A version of this text, in English and Portuguese, can be found at http://www.premiopipa.com/pag/artistas/eleonora-fabiao/ (“projects” tab).

⁸ Malabou (2008), pp. 5–6 (author’s emphases).

⁹ Lepecki (2014), p. 302.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Eleonora Fabião

Eleonora Fabião, Ph.D., is a performance artist and theorist. She has been performing in streets, lecturing, conducting workshops and publishing internationally. Professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro – Theater Directing Undergraduate Program and Arts of the Scene Graduate Program where she chairs the artistic experimentation wing –, she holds a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from New York University. In 2011 Fabião received the Arts in the Streets’ Award from the Brazilian National Foundation of the Arts and in 2014 the Rumos Itaú Cultural Grant that resulted in the publication of the book Ações/Actions (Tamanduá Arte, 2015). Her performance work has been enacted in several venues including, most recently, Things That Must Be Done Series at Performa #15 (New York, 2015), MOVIMENTO HO/HO MOVEMENT at Municipal Art Center Hélio Oiticica (Rio de Janeiro, 2016), and azul azul azul e azul/blue blue blue and blue at Bispo do Rosário Museum (Rio de Janeiro, 2016). She recently taught as visiting professor in institutions and projects such as: MA in Scenic Practice and Visual Culture-Castilla-La Mancha University (2017), Buenos Aires Performance Biennual (2017), La Voz Humana-Havana (2017), Movimiento Sur-Chile (2016), Norwegian Theater Academy (2016), Stockholm University of the Arts (2016), Department of Performance Studies-New York University (2010 to 2015), Museum of Modern Art-New York (2014).