Ontogenic Portrait / Self-Portrait. Version 2. Online performance on bass drum April 10th, 2020. San Jose, Costa Rica. Plaza de la cultura, El Hilo Vibrante, Museos del Banco Central, San Jose, Costa Rica, 2023.
For the Ise shrine, too, the technique of preservation resides in allowing the circle of life to begin anew over and over again, maintaining life not against death but through and beyond death. Death itself is built into the system of preservation. In this way Being gives way to the cyclical process that includes death and decay. In the unending cycle of life there is no longer anything unique, original, singular, or final. Only repetitions and reproductions exist.
Shanzai: deconstruction in Chinese. Byung-Chul Han
My paternal grandfather was a victim of the authoritarian regime of Chiang Kai Shek in Taiwan which has been known as the White Terror: after his role in the organization of a massive pacific protest of his university students military agents in common clothes took him away and we never saw him again. In 1997 after government documents were finally revealed his murder by multiple gunshots was confirmed to us. This piece tries to reconcile the death of my Grandfather not as an end of his individual life, but as part of a continuous process of life which is composed by the multiplicity of lives and eventual deaths of all of us who conform a context, a group, a community. The piece tries to unify his life to mine, and to the group of human beings that surround me instead of contrasting his death with our vitality.
The performance was an attempt to portray the hearts of individuals by interpreting on the bass drum the heart rate of each volunteer. The final part of the performance consisted in interpreting my own heart rate which is altered by the effort of emptying myself to give form to the life of the people I’ve represented into sound portraits, culminating in the acceleration of the pulse of the bass drum to the point where my body was no longer able to withstand the effort and stopped. When a person receives multiple gunshots the heart accelerates to compensate for the loss of blood until the organ is stretched to its limit and stops suddenly, this last part of the performance was a way of conveying this. The piece uses the heart beat as the immanent motor of our lives, the lives which represented in the multiple lives connected to me during the performance construct a momentum that culminates in a portrait of the moment of death of my Grandfather. The idea is to generate a multiple and continuos unity, traced with the plurality of people connected to give shape to a multiple existence, where individual death becomes one more trace of a joint life. The repetition and reproduction of the heartbeats is the preservation of life in a succession of existences.
Link to video (in Spanish):
