black sun, narcissus


The performance includes three distinct acts; reading, reciting, and cadaverizing. All three acts are complemented by improvisational cello sounds that, during the premiere, were performed by a professional cello player, Ekahuil. I wear a self-made metal chain skirt with dead fish hanging at the ends of the chains. The dead fish are neatly hooked and are integral to the work, both materially and symbolically. I wear large black boots and a latex shirt with black pants.

In the first act of the performance, I read a passage from Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia (1989) by Bulgarian-French philosopher Julia Kristeva.

“An infinite number of misfortunes weigh us down every day . . . All this suddenly gives me another life. A life that is unlivable, heavy with daily sorrows, tears held back or shed, a total despair, scorching at times, then wan and empty. In short, a devitalized existence that, although occasionally fired by the effort I make to prolong it, is ready at any moment for a plunge into death. An avenging death or a liberating death,  it  is  henceforth  the  inner  threshold  of  my  despondency,  the  impossible meaning of a life whose burden constantly seems unbear-able,  save  for  those  moments  when  I  pull  myself  together  and  face  up to the disaster. I live a living death, my flesh is wounded, bleed-ing,  cadaverized,  my  rhythm  slowed  down  or  interrupted,  time  has  been erased or bloated, absorbed into sorrow . . . Absent from other people’s  meaning,  alien,  accidental with  respect  to  naive  happiness,  I  owe  a  supreme,  metaphysical  lucidity  to  my  depression.  On  the  frontiers  of  life  and  death,  occasionally  I  have  the  arrogant  feeling  of  being  witness  to  the  meaninglessness  of  Being,  of  revealing” (Julia Kristeva “Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia” 1989)

I read it slowly, making timid eye contact with the audience. The cello sounds softly to accompany my voice.

I chose to include and read this particular section to foreground the performance, indicating a refusal to positivist recovery and progress, and instead embracing the unbearable weight of no return to wholeness. The section speaks to me in terms of witnessing and living through times of mass global destruction, and carrying responsibility for the audience’s experience of the piece, Kristeva’s words allow my regard for the surrounding environment to take position before the second and third acts.

The second part of the performance is a balance between reciting and cadaverizing, as both acts feed one another in a brutal manifestation. This brutality of the second and third acts is reached by me reciting the Narcissus poem:

that didn’t happen
and if it did  
it wasn’t that bad  
and if it was
that’s not a big deal
and if it is
that’s not my fault
and if it was
I didn’t mean it
and if I did
you deserve it

while I hook and cadaverize dead fish, each time slowly raising my voice.


I have been using the term cadaverizing deliberately to denote more than the physical dismemberment and desecration of the fish; it signifies a semiotic process of rendering the fish as cadavers—objects caught between life and death.

At this point, the performance becomes more pointedly voyeuristic, as it is the dialogue between the dead fish and me; the audience is there to witness. The Narcissus poem I recite:

that didn’t happen
and if it did  
it wasn’t that bad  
and if it was
that’s not a big deal
and if it is
that’s not my fault
and if it was
I didn’t mean it
and if I did
you deserve it

—functions as the ideological spine of the performance. The reciting of the poem becomes both a lament of sorrows, as my distress takes hold of me, and a wicked manipulation of denying my violence I commit against something already dead.

This act is finished once all fish are cadaverized, so to speak, their heads torn, insides exposed, and their material form utterly destroyed. When this is accomplished, I walk out of the performance space, while the cello sounds continue to play for a moment, as an appreciation of the space left behind.

performance, 15 minutes

part of ZOT x WEP #SEEN,
WEP project space, Groningen
film documentation: J. Roussel
cello: Ekahuil