HAU 2, April 13th/14th, 8 pm
André Masseno, Rio de Janeiro
»Outdoor Corpo Machine«
German premiere
Artist Talk: April 14th, after the performance
»Under no circumstances can man escape his imperfections.«
Georges Bataille
“Outdoor Corpo Machine” focuses on the male bodies that are prominently featured in the media e.g. on billboards, in action films, bodybuilding magazines and nude photographs – in other words, images that “sell” ideals such as youth, power, beauty and economic success. André Masseno uses these images to present an auto-fictional piece in which he projects himself and his own body into a body that resembles a shopping window or a machine. It is foreign to him, but as a human being and queer artist, it is not unknown. A game of identities begins, in which the performer – by referencing seemingly healthy and masculine bodies – uses his own physique to create a spatio-temporal corporeality and express contemporary mankind’s aversion to the repulsive as such, as well as the disfigurement of one’s own body.
However, “Outdoor Corpo Machine” doesn’t intend to supply answers to the problems mentioned above. Instead, it seeks to create a flexible theatrical atmosphere that allows the audience, faced with such an also seductive shopping window-machine-body, to develop its own dramaturgy on the basis of the physical experience of the artist. It thus confirms, removes and corrects information about itself and the environment, which it enters into a dialogue with.
The Political Aspect of this Performance
In this solo, André Masseno continues his auto-fictional studies in which he continually approaches the research of subjectivity from the perspective of gender, sexuality and the – individual and/or collective – history of the body.
In “Outdoor Corpo Machine”, visual information and the written word enter into a dialogue, create tension and renew the context of images and statements. The atmosphere is composed of various fragments: a cut-out square, Nijinsky’s “Fawn”, images of naked men, a sentence by Oscar Wilde, the Barbie doll Ken, white pieces of paper and the Copacabana, creating a visual text in which the audience can develop its own “reading” of the material.
As a language study, “Outdoor Corpo Machine” continues the examination of a hybrid performance landscape, in which elements of contemporary dance, Live Art and theater are combined.