The Gestural Dimension of Artistic Practice: Performance, Politics and Responsibility in Zoitsa Noriega’s Installation-Performance Daphne

Abstract

The relevance of art for thinking about the problem of responsibility, and how it articulates a certain knowledge that springs out from the body, is one of the main problems at stake in Zoitsa Noriega’s installation-performance Daphne (Fig. 1), a project developed from 2014 to 2016 with the collaboration of the artist Jaime Guzman, who worked in the video production, and the musician Federico Demmer, who composed and performed live the music for the piece. This work is a “response” to the abhorrent death of Rosa Elvira Cely, a woman brutally attacked, sexually abused and killed in Bogotá in 2012, whose death became a symbol of violence against women in Colombia and inspired a law, the law 1761 from 2015, that declared femicide a crime. Noriega’s piece elicits a deconstruction of gender violence, and the way in which such violence involves a sort of silencing of the lived body, that is, of the body conceived primordially as a power of expression, as openness to the world and, ultimately, as the affirmation or manifestation of a singular, unalienable perspective, that is, the perspective of a political identity, for instance, the political identity of women. Indeed, insofar as the lived body is both a visible thing and the primordial means of expression of one’s singular stance in the world, the “invisible” background that grants meaning to existence, it has an ambiguous character and is both subjective and objective, the testimony and negation of the singularity of existence.