Martyrium as Performance

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Notes

¹‘The declaration rings of 1960s and 1970s cultural feminist attempts to resurrect the Goddess and celebrate female biology. But in 1989, “My body is a temple” appeared in large bold type on a promo flyer featuring a photograph of a nude black man performing oral sex with Veronica Vera, a white ‘porn queen’ who had recently become a performance artist’ (Schneider 1997: 11).

²‘La blessure revisite les martyrs. Ici, c'est encore question du corps, on le brûle, l’écorche, le blesse … . C'est toujours le sang de l'homme Dieu’ (Pane 2003: 69).

³‘La décision de ne plus créer d'action impliquant la mise en scène de mon corps a été prise après avoir réalisé, en 1978 (action Little Journey), ma dernière blessure’ (Pane 2003: 37).

⁴Three Jesuit events spectacularly marked late-sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century Lisbon: the Solene Recebimento das Relíquias de São Roque (the Ceremonial Reception of the Relics of St. Roch) in 1588, the performance of the Real Tragicomédia do Descobrimento e Conquista do Oriente (the Royal Tragicomedy of the Discovery and Conquest of the Orient) in 1619 and the Festas de Canonização de Inácio de Loiola e de Francisco Xavier (the Celebration of the Canonization of Ignatius Loyola and Francisco Xavier) in 1622 (Tércio 1994).

⁵The term ‘exoteric’ is used here to underline the dimension of the general public, in contrast to the ‘esoteric’ dimension, which is restricted to the limited group of initiates.