For my Performing Body piece, I chose to depict Maria Evelia Marmolejo, specifically drawing reference from a documentary photograph from her Anonimo 3 piece. Anonimo 3 was one of a series of performances she created with a theme of her face, and therefore her identity, being shrouded by white gauze in varying forms and degrees. By covering her face in this way, she established a sense of anonymity, hence the title of the series of performances. Marmolejo’s Anonimo series consisted of themes of acting as a representative for the human race as a whole, the role of women in society, or to draw attention to the larger issues beyond the individual level. Anonimo 3 in particular dealt with the notion of human pollution on earth, and attempting to give back to the earth something that humans have taken away.
In the performance, Marmolejo performed for a total of fifteen minutes, with witnesses aside from her being just a photographer and the river nearby. Like many of her works, the performance was held in South America, specifically in her home country of Colombia. She began with her face wrapped a multitude of times in gauze, and strips of surgical tape adhered in various places on her body. As the performance continued, she approached a toilet bowl in the middle of a circular clearing of the land in Valle del Cauca and began performing a vaginal wash over the open bowl. Marmolejo’s intention was for her washing fluids to symbolize a gift to the earth, and a rebirth of sorts for the soil which had been ruined by the pollution of humans. Whether the fluids actually acted as fertilizer for the soil or not is unknown, but the symbolism of, as a woman, giving a part of her own body to the earth and allowing what grows there to feed off of something of her own is powerful and draws connection to the maternal instinct of women to nurture and cultivate. Her performance was intended to be an apology to the earth of sorts, in order to pay respects on behalf of the human race.
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