Live performance (elaborated in situ)

Duration : 3 hrs

This performance seeks to exercise different manners of “taking up space”. It puts on view spatial, bodily and psychological occupation. Transformation leads up to viewership ambiguity and discomfort. The rhythm and intensity of the performance heightens with time. The flow and density of actions grow in immoderation by repeating a “cam girl” like dance for one audience member at a time (in front of other members of audience watching), occurring incessantly during the performance. The manually looped soundtrack (Hungry Ghost by Hurray for the Riff Raff) serves as a score for displacement within the gallery space, in relation to the chosen objects/foods and a present audience. Through this durational improvisation, the costume is a marker of change in states of being/feelings and reveals a gradual overflow of everything typically constrained.

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« Nadège bought the neon green cake at Coleman's, even though she said she didn't want to use food anymore in her performance. She takes her time at a grocery store, where the rest of us had zoomed through. I went back down the aisles to retrieve her, helping her pick out a pack of spaghetti and some nuts, because I was tired and we were moving around town like a pack of pound puppies. She says if she doesn't end up using the cake, then we all get to eat it. I still held this thought in mind up until the second she straddled the cake and pound it into oblivion. Oh well.

I don't know where she got the grapefruit, orange, and lemon from. One rolled close to me, and I felt so deprived of vitamin C that I thought about taking the grapefruit and eating it right then and there. Instead, I just eyed it longingly. As she pierced the fruit with her high heels, I thought, it's still good, but as she sucked it dry and squeezed all remnants of the skin and flesh into her hair, face, and eyes, there was not a drop left to be salvaged. The citrus tones mingled with the smell of her sweat, and the spaghetti water still hanging in the air. The scents may still be lingering there.

When she comes up to dance over me again near the end of the performance, I can see the translucent skin of the grapefruit membranes clinging to her hair, half covering her face. She is staring at me with dead eyes, and I stare back, unable to not give her the up and down, but simultaneously judging anyone else who looked like they were objectifying her body. But most didn't. The students ranged from playful to incredibly shy, and the kids in the room, especially the boys, bolted the minute she started undressing herself. I was probably the most salacious of the voyeurs, or simply the least passive by letting myself feel hungry for everything. »

— Saltbox January 28th Blog entry by Amy Fung.

Saltbox curators : D'Arcy Wilson and Mattew R. Hill
Saltbox performers : Hazel Meyer, Jerry Ropson, Adrian Stimson
Saltbox writer-in-residence : Amy Fung

Cover image : Saltbox 2018's poster image; Credit : Nadège Grebmeier Forget, Esquisse to Follies, 2018-08-06 (23h02)
Documentation : Faune Ybarra, Amy Fung (vertical), Nadège Grebmeier Forget (1st and last image)