performance
3h13'29"
Maxxi/Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, Roma, 2023
Credits: Conceived, developed and performed by Eloisa Calabrese; Video and Photos by Edgard Allan Deop
Passus is a work designed, developed and executed by Eloisa C. in July 2023 in Rome, at the MAXXI in Rome, further exemplifies her commitment to exploring the boundaries of pain and endurance.
This performance pushed the limits of physical and emotional resilience, challenging both the artist and the audience to confront their own thresholds of suffering and empathy.
The performance was a powerful meditation on the human capacity for endurance and the ways in which we process and understand pain.
“ The condition in which many people, especially if they are people with childhood traumas, such as violence or abuse, is a condition of constant expressive fatigue.
We live as if clinging to a noose that tightens around our necks. I see the figure of Zaha Hadid with detachment, I don't venerate her, however I believe she has symbolic potential for all people who try to express their potential.
In that context, for me, the hot asphalt at the gates of the "Temple of Art" was of greater attraction than the Museum itself. I wanted to live, I wanted to burn and feel how far I could go, whether or not I would be able to enter that fresh and rich place that is called a drapery of culture, or if I would remain motionless and defenseless in my own pain. While I was experiencing that feeling, going as slowly as possible, I saw my father. And I saw the pain of time and I also saw the strength of every pain. Art for me is mostly a Kairotic experience.
I firmly believe in a structure of wonder and elevation and yet a Gestalt approach remains in me, and in this I can only echo the words of Jean-Jacques Rousseau "Our first masters of philosophy are our feet, our hands, our eyes."
Elosa C.
Passus is originates from her childhood, marked by abandonment and violence suffered, in a context in wich women are seen as wives, mothers or in service for a religious project.
The artist shows herself with the only dress sewn by one of her aunts with whom she grew up and with traces on her body that try in vain to resume what are possible memories of their origins.
The artist, wearing the clothes sewn by her family, trying to reconcile with her origins, despite the beliefs and structures that she too has assimilated, tries despite the burning of the soles of her feet, to reach one of the temples, one of the fundamental places of contemporary art, however she walks along it with burnt feet. Burned like his roots, the spiritual, physical and mental health struggle to get to express herself, to be present.
Eloisa C. remained for more then three hours walking almost imperceptibly, trying to be as inert as possible. So, She begins her journey by entering with a step on the hot asphalt of a busy Rome, summer at 43 ° around 2pm.
Traffic and people continue their urban process, sometimes wayfarers overwhelmed by their path are unable to see her in her slowness, risking hitting her.
A work of performative art marked by heat, by the pain of the burns caused by the hot asphalt at the artist's feet, by the viewer's concern.
The performance Passus is a reflection, it is a call against the systematic alienation to which we are all exposed.