Uncathartic Rituals

2024

Cristiana de Marchi &

Andrew Champlin

Performance Project in Development

In the Spring of 2023, Cristiana de Marchi (visual artist and writer) and Andrew Champlin (dancer and filmmaker) began an exchange of perspectives on the topic of witnessing inflicted violence. Starting with letters, the exchange developed into a responsive practice where the artists explore acts of translation in various forms, such as the fabrication and collection of images, memories, songs, words, gestures, and movement.

Working toward live performance and dance, film becomes a trace of the artists’ collective struggle to stay intimate with ambiguities at stake in their research on the suffering others have to face. The short film below is a document of the artists’ experimental exchange of materials, craft, and context.

In the film, hands become a metaphor of absence. The inability to fully grasp recurs in a ritualistic manner, further dislocating reconciliation into repetitive fragments. The excerpt explores the construction of a situation where a viewer perceives fragmented aspects. An example of this would be an excerpt from “Anima,” by Wajdi Mouawad, that appears as voiceover, in its original French version. Here, voice becomes the link from the specular to the performative; an experiment with ways of establishing rituals that deny catharsis.

"It wasn’t that the words weren’t big enough, they just weren’t fast enough. Had it existed? How do you respond when you feel like the madman trying to grasp with both hands the verb ‘to be’ conjugated in the rushed-present-tense? What to do with the shattered fragments of their own history? Fragments that they keep rehashing, unable to connect the parts since the only witness to their disaster...refuse to testify for them?"

—Wajdi Mouawad, “Anima”