see-through [2019]
durational performance
Concept, installation, performance: Federica Dauri
9 April – 14 June 2019 — #SADEME, Xavier Laboulbenne, Berlin, Germany
Group exhibition
14 November 2019 —Meme gallery Athens, Greece
See-through is a long-durational performance exploring stillness, physical limitation, and the body as sculpture, where movement is progressively reduced towards an almost complete state of immobility.
A sheet of flexible metal mesh is shaped directly onto the nude body, following its anatomy and taking its form from the performer’s position. The sculpture does not exist independently from the body: the body itself becomes the mould through which the sculpture is created. Once formed, body and metal remain intimately connected, producing a single sculptural configuration in which it becomes difficult to determine where anatomy ends and sculpture begins.
The metal mesh contains a fundamental contradiction. It restricts the body and operates almost as a cage, while its open structure remains transparent, porous, and visually light. The solidity of metal coexists with an ethereal quality: the sculpture appears almost weightless, like a metallic membrane shaped by the body it contains. The boundary it creates is simultaneously physical and unstable, confining the body while allowing it to remain visible through the material.
Within this configuration, movement is reduced almost entirely to stillness. The performance unfolds through silence and duration, shifting attention towards the materiality of presence: the weight of the body, breath, skin against metal, muscular tension, and the almost imperceptible transformations produced by remaining in the same condition over time. Choreography is reduced to breath, presence, and the subtle internal transformations of a seemingly motionless body.
As duration progresses, the distinction between anatomy and sculpture becomes increasingly uncertain. The mesh follows and distorts the contours of the body, while the human figure gradually loses the clarity of its boundaries, suspended between body, object, and living sculpture.
See-through brings together immobility, limitation, duration, and sculpture in an attempt to approach a state of almost pure presence.