Untitled was the very first performance I performed myself. It was a street performance that I performed twice in Canterbury, UK.
My intention was to see what happened when one distorted one’s face, to leave behind an identity and claim a new one. I used women’s stockings to distort my face. One by one I pulled them over my face, putting on wigs and drawing on my face without really seeing what I was drawing. By touch I tried to find my eyes, nose and lips, and drew a new face on the stockings. I repeated this process until it was too dangerous to continue.
The stockings would prohibit my breathing after a while. After the 6th or 7th stocking, my nose would be completely pushed against my face and I struggled to breathe. I tried to use this risk and experience in the performance as part of the narrative. It was only until I started feeling faint that I would end the performance. It was a comment on taking on so many new identities (through social media for example) that we would lose ourselves and eventually choke on every role and every facade we take on.
The performance ends when I rip through the stockings, revealing my face stained with different colors as if they are bruises left behind by the faces I tried to take on.
The thing that remains with me from this performance is the distortion of the face through the stockings. In my practice currently, I do not incorporate a narrative as strongly as here, but the distortion of these facial features remain interesting. That and the inability to breathe. In the future I would like to make a whole performance around breath.
Céline Deveux 