LOADING OPEN LAB

Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Performing Clowning Pinocchio by Theo Pelmus

live feed web cam performance from Loading Open LAB ,Bucharest, Romania
16.08.2010
9 am Canadian time, 4 pm Romanian time

This project is based on the idea of performativity of the character Pinocchio. Pinocchio is performed through a clowning strategy.
The character travels in order to define his identity. The normativity of his identity is dictated by the environment in which time and space places him.
The project has two components: poster action and live ...feed web cam performance.
The poster action component consists of placing posters in the cities that I have visited during my trip to Romania. So far I have covered eight cities and one city that used to belong to Romania, Balcic (now belonging to Bulgaria). The posters portray two representations of Pinocchio: one comic and the other one disturbed. Both of them represent the failure of representation of identity. But this failure succeeds to define his deformed and incomplete self. Being Romanian means to fail throughout history. Romanian society is contradictory and illogical. Satire, comedy, disturbance, beauty, garbage and luxury coexist.
Traveling is a key factor in this project. After five years I returned to my native country Romania to revisit the past, present and future. Romania is still in a failing status. The economy does not function in a smooth manner. The burden of bureaucracy and inequality is a constant reality. I visited nine cities in a search to find differences and place my Pinocchio identity in a Romanian context.
What does it mean to be Romanian? The most appropriate answer is to perform Pinocchio. I left my family in order to discover. I have been swallowed in the big Canadian belly. There I have been performing my roles, clown, gold leaf face, disturbed character and Pinocchio. All these characters have a poetic and abject language. Pinocchio in order to become in being had traveled through all the other characters that were before him. Traveling implies creating distances; leaving and approaching. Through the poster action of this project temporary spaces are marked as if marks are left on a trail in order to not become lost. The action of being photographed with the photographed character is meant to create another realm of the reality of the Pinocchio character.
When the destination is reached Pinocchio has to communicate back, to mirror past and present, to mirror the starting point of his trip with the final destination. The live feed performance is meant to translate this communication between two spaces. But through this process privacy is not anymore a matter of being someone. Everyone on the Internet can see him communicating as if he is an archetype of identity. He is telling a story of becoming human from and inanimate object, becoming an identity from a non-identity. Performing Clowning Pinocchio contextualizes Theo Pelmus in a space between Romania and Canada.

www.theopelmus.com