Carefully Violent and Violently Caring: How Paul Setúbal and Paula Garcia metabolise trauma - London, 2023
Leo Krenzer
Violence and care. What do these terms have in common? Surely linguistic amalgamations such as ‘careful violence’ and ‘violent care’ are oxymoronic, mutually exclusive, or even incompatible? In order to make the case for two performances which exhibit acts of care amidst settings brimming with brutality, I am allowing myself a temporary departure from the main subject of my writing in order to underscore the importance of my positionality.
When I was fifteen years old I was subjected to a short-lived, acutely painful, and humiliating act of violence, (the nature of which I won’t delve into any further to protect my own privacy). At the age of sixteen, this experience, which I had pushed to the back of my mind, began to resurface. Unbeknownst to me, the memory of this event had been indelibly marked into my brain and body, the explicit outlines of which would reappear in irregular bursts, which I later came to understand as ‘flashbacks’. Last academic year, whilst undertaking my undergraduate studies, I received psychiatric care which involved re-exposure therapy.
This consisted in recounting the above-mentioned experience, as if rewinding the tape of a naturalistic film, and watching it over and over again, with the aim of becoming partially anaesthetised to its visceral affliction. Recovering in this way required for me to cast my mind back to the violence I was subjected to, but within the four walls of a space which was steeped in care. In this exercise, a partial overlap between both my fifteen- year-old body and my adult body was necessary in order to make the distinction known to myself and to my mind, that I was no longer in danger. During this process, in a matter of weeks, the caustic sting , subdued to a dull ache and eventually, through consistent work, the memory became a mere echo and entered my well of reminiscence, allowing me to recover carefully. My experience of, and continuous recovery from post-traumatic stress disorder has equipped me with a distinctive understanding of the paradoxical yet intimate relationship which can occur between both violence and care.
In this essay, my exploration of Paul Setúbal’s piece Because the knees bend and Paula Garcia’s work Noise Body and the ways in which both performance artists exhibit ethics of care, is supported by scholars such as Daniel Engster and Maurice Hamington and their writing on care ethics. Both academicians argue that ethics of care point towards ‘a more relational perspective on social and political problems that eschews simplistic judgments about right or wrong isolated from all context, for a more complete understanding of persons and actions enmeshed in relationships and situated in their environment (Engster, Hamington 2015: 1).’
As such, given Engster and Hamington’s inclination towards embracing the inherent contradictions of care, I aim to explore what Setúbal and Garcia self-describe as the ‘protocols’ with which they approach their practice whilst encouraging the equivocal and (at times) contradictory reading of both pieces of performance. When observing the scholarly conversation of care ethics, it’s important to note that hypothesis grows through a process of embracing multifariousness. As Engster and Hamington put it, ‘One thinker finds something lacking in a previous theorist’s ideas and puts forth a new theory to correct it.
The first theorist responds with a defense of her views and a slight divide enters the field’ (Engster, Hamington 2015: 3). I say this because, in my writing, I am interested in creating a site for dialogic exchange within the wider academic conversation on care ethics, and how one’s engagement in the study of both care(ful) violence and violent care can diversify the landscape of care ethics and its application towards performance studies. Earlier this academic year (October 2023), I had the great privilege of attending the Marina Abramović Institute Takeover at the Southbank Centre in London (Southbank Centre: 2023).
This event was made up of an array of different site-specific performances, all of which were ‘self-led’ meaning that audience members were invited to ‘explore all parts of the building’, including backstage dressing rooms, green rooms as well as technical spaces. Amongst these long-durational works which had been curated by conceptual artist Marina Abramović, I was exceptionally moved by two pieces: Because the knees bend and Noise Body. The former performance took place in a backstage corridor, the width of which reduced in size, as audiences progressively walked from entrance to exit, whilst the latter was put on in a large storage space (reminiscent of a shipping container) fashioned into an end-on staging configuration (see picture 1; 2).
It’s important to specify that both pieces, by virtue of what I liberally describe as ‘costume’, anonymise their respective performance makers. For instance, when I first came across Paul Setúbal’s piece, I wasn’t met with the maker of the work, but instead a figure dressed head to toe in black anti-riot gear (see picture 3). This unidentified individual powerfully and continuously hit the edges of the space with a rubber baton, leaving traces of violent strikes on the blank wall. Evocative of the ‘Pollock drip’, Setúbal was creating an artefact before my eyes, pummel-by-pummel; an ever-impregnating tableaux of violence, the traces of its energy filling its blank canvas (see picture 4). Upon being introduced to Paula’s work, I was left unsure as to whether or not this piece involved a human protagonist.
As I entered the performance space, I noticed metallic material being used in a plethora of different ways including piles of nails, a boxed-in steel clad wall, as well as a metal armour which stood independently, center stage. The performance involved four of Garcia’s ‘collaborators’ throwing nails at the metallic and, what I thought of (at the time) as being an inanimate body (see picture 5). Owing to its magnets, the cataphract became covered with nails fixed to its frame, and only when this metallic body had seemingly transmuted into a hard-edged other, did I begin to see it shaking, revealing to me the person who was trapped inside: Paula Garcia.
Following my seeing these performances at Southbank, I was able to interview both Paul and Paula over video conference. In a bid to discern whether or not I could consider these performer-audience interactions as a first meeting, I asked them both the following question: “We’re in quite a unique setting, because I’ve met you (in a way), when I saw Because the knees bend[/Noise Body], but you haven’t met me, and I’m wondering whether I have met you (in a way) and whether when you’re performing this piece, do you identify as Paul[/a] or do you identify as someone else, a different iteration of yourself?” In response to this, Paul expressed that although the work stems from a violent “personal experience from [his] childhood”, when this experience is “transform[ed] into a piece, it [becomes] another thing”. Setúbal describes this process in more depth explaining that: “When the performance is finished, each day, I become Paul again, but when I start [the performance] it’s just like a [mathematical] problem, [or equation] that I have to deal with”.
The partial dissociation for Paul between his performer as well as his non-performer self is something which Paula shares in her own work, expressing: “In my personal life I had to deal with a lot of things. I’m forty-nine years old, I’m Brazilian, [...] I was a queer child of the seventies [...] in a time of oppression and repression”, “so I had to deal with a lot of these aspects of violence, [and] of very subtle violence, (which is the worst sometimes), [...] because of this I developed a kind of claustrophobia in my life”. In answering my question more specifically, Garcia shared with me: “I think [when I’m performing] it’s Paula overcoming a lot of things and I think it’s Paula understanding much more about herself” (Krenzer: 2024).
In Care Ethics and Political Theory, Daniel Engster and Maurice Hamington explore areas of commonality amongst different theorists who each ‘construct their definition of care ethics differently’. One of these regions of overlap includes ‘crossing moral boundaries’, and more specifically the dictum, rooted in feminist studies, that the ‘personal is political’.
This departure from care as ‘compartmentalised’ and transcending its status from its preconceived ‘private sphere’ to a more public forum is a process indicated by Joan Tronto (Engster, Hamington 2015: 4). This academician, specialising in the study of care, stresses the importance that the divide between disinterested ethical theory and particularist approaches be redrawn (Tronto 1993: 6-10). In homogenising strands of ‘disinterested ethical theory’ and my particularist approach of observing performative acts of violent care, I aim to make the case for Paul/a’s pieces as performances which embrace their respective personal-as-political strategies. However, before I delve into the inner workings of this approach, it’s important to consider how one can interpret the terms ‘personal’ and ‘political’. Within this context, Paul Setúbal and Paula Garcia offer performances under the umbrella of the Marina Abramović Institute (MAI), where Abramović herself acts as a figurehead, commissioner, and curator (Marina Abramovic Institute 2024).
In her own practice, the ‘world’s most famous performance artist’ views her work as entirely separate from theatre: “when you [take part in] perform[ance art] you have a knife and it’s your blood, when you’re acting it’s ketchup and you don’t cut yourself” (HBO Documentary Films 2012). Although, unlike some of Abramović’s pieces (see picture 6), Setúbal and Garcia’s work doesn’t involve self-mutilation, their commitment bears undeniable parallels with Abramović’s ethos of testing the human body’s limits in performance. In Because the knees bend, Setúbal quite literally embodies a figure of power, using his own body and a police baton which he repeatedly smashes against a wall for hours on end. In repeating this kinetic and acoustic ritual with only very few breaks, Setúbal incarnates an indefatigable conduit of energy, in a performance whose only rule, ironically, is ‘bodily exhaustion’ (Gordon 2023).
Garcia’s approach offers a similar calibre. When being asked ‘what does [your] art mean to you?’ the artist responded: ‘Life’ (Gordon 2023). This single-word answer encapsulates Noise Body’s spirit, a performance which involves a sequence or what Garcia describes as a “protocol” which is repeated continuously until the piece’s completion. This routine involves fellow collaborators throwing nails which, due to neodymium magnets, fix themselves to Garcia’s body armour.
Confined within this metal shell, reminiscent of the artist’s experiences of claustrophobia which she experienced in her youth, the artist carries the additional weight which accumulates as the “protocol” reaches its full execution. The final element within this composition is Paula’s own body shaking, the visual cue which signals to her co-participants that her body can no longer sustain the metallic mass. Following this, the armour and its debris is detached one piece at a time. Once reunited with her body-sans-alloy, she lies on the floor centre-stage, resting only to re-set and begin anew. This process of externalising invisible magnetic forces and rendering them visible to audiences is symptomatic, for Paula, of larger concepts related to force, such as: “political and social forces, systems of control”; “It’s like magnets unveil this power” she says (Garcia 2016).
A question which bears conceptual (as opposed to literal) weight within this discussion, is how might Paul[/a] care for themselves whilst exhibiting performative acts of violence which inflict such a toll on their bodies as performers? This question pertaining to self-care is one which I’ll return to at a latter point in this essay. Observing the human body as Because the knees bend and Noise Body’s primary tool of communication, enables us to understand the viscerally embodied task of performing for both Setúbal and Garcia and in so doing audiences are invited to explore how this might affect them on a level which is personal.
In a bid to clarify how this ‘personal’ may unite with the ‘political’ in both artists’ personal-as-political strategies, Garcia expressed to me in our interview: “I think all the bodies are political, if you are alive you are a political body, that’s it” (Krenzer: 2024). This was a sentiment which led me to understand Tronto’s ‘personal is political’ mandate as ontological, something innate in our species of being. As Maurice Hamington writes in Embodied Care, ‘our corporeal existence and affective relationships encompass ambiguities that preclude the certainty we often crave in our moral theories’ (Hamington 2004: 7). When examining these affective relationships and how they are shaped by care, one is often drawn to dyadic structures – a child and a parent for example. However, in these performances I aim to explore moments in Because the knees bend and Noise Body which affirm that our world is one which ‘coheres through human connection’ (Gilligan 2009: 29).
I evaluate such occurrences, in dyadic formations (involving two individuals), but equally in triangular ones (three individuals), as well as larger constellatory relations between a myriad of co-participants. Before examining these unique moments of connection which occurred at the Southbank centre between performers and fellow performers, audience members with performers, as well as audience members amongst themselves, I’d like to delve into the ways in which I was personally affected by both works.
As touched upon in my introduction to this essay, the full repossession of both my mind and body in recovering from post-traumatic stress disorder was catalysed by re-exposure to the very incident that had traumatised me. This was a process which I define as violently caring, because in order to recover wholly, and ultimately to take care of myself, I had to subject myself to an act which was simultaneously violent yet caring in equal measures. The gradual process of coming to terms with what had happened to me was greatly helped by my reading of a book which was recommended to me by my psychotherapist at the time. This publication was ‘The Body Keeps the Score’, a hybrid between self-help and psychoanalytic research which delves into the relationship between ‘brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma’. Van Der Kolk expresses that the challenge is: ‘How can people gain control over the residues of past trauma and return to being masters of their own ship? Talking, understanding, and human connections help, and drugs can dampen hyperactive alarm systems. But we will also see that the imprints from the past can be transformed by having physical experiences that directly contradict the helplessness, rage, and collapse that are part of trauma, and thereby regaining self-mastery’ (Van Der Kolk 2015: 13).
As explored in my writing, this process of regaining my sense of self, was one which involved the very ‘helplessness, rage, and collapse’ which informed the traumatic memory, but by virtue of sheer repetition and readjustment, I was able to reorganise this event in my mind. This meant that it didn’t appear in spasmodic and irregular bursts when cues in my day-to-day life matched up with the incident, a chain of events which used to subsequently ‘trigger’ my re-living of the above-mentioned event, as if it were happening in the here and now.
Although, thankfully, I now rarely experience flashbacks, there is still leftover residue as a consequence of what my mind and body were put through. This means that no matter the psychoanalytic technique and its efficacy, my brain (as with every human brain), wasn’t and still isn’t, unlike a computer for instance, capable of executing a ‘clear cache’, and deleting the memory completely. However, this does mean that care in recovery is an ongoing and, in many ways, a limitless act of defiance towards psychological injury.
Whilst watching both Because the knees bend and Noise Body, I felt the same violently caring pang in my stomach which was analogous to my experience of re-exposure therapy.
Van Der Kolk explores a range of methods which ‘utilize the brain’s own neuroplasticity to help survivors feel fully alive in the present and move on with their lives’, of these I identified with two in response to Paul[/a]’s work: 1) ‘top down, by talking, (re-)connecting with others, and allowing ourselves to know and understand what is going on with us, while processing the memories of the trauma’, and 2) ‘bottom up: by allowing the body to have experiences that deeply and viscerally [gainsay the embodied effects] from trauma’ (Van Der Kolk 2015: 11).
In summary, Setúbal and Garcia’s work affected me through continuous acts of violent care. These were punctuated by a physical resilience which reminded me of the mental battle which I had overcome in recovering from my disorder just a year prior to seeing their work. Whilst interviewing Setúbal, he shared with me that Because the Knees Bend “is about a kind of energy that I try to create for this piece [...] because I’m working with this violent movement and working with the energy of the people”. He stresses that within this piece he is a “receptor of all these kinds of energy [brought to him by audiences] and I have to deal with it [...] like a mathematical equation” he says (Krenzer: 2024). In exercising concision, in our conversation, we settled on the following formula which encapsulated the work, wherein “Because the Knees Bend” acted as the ‘constant’, and participants acted as ‘dependent variables’.
Because the Knees Bend = x + y
This meant that audiences’ contributions to the work could impact the energy which Paul received, a key part of Setúbal’s “problem” which he set out to “deal with”. Whilst undertaking the performance at the Southbank Centre, Paul expressed that he “received an e-mail from a woman, talking about her experience [of the performance] and this was like a psychoanalytic session. [..] She told me about a kind of transformation, she passed through [Setúbal’s physical passage whilst re-living the violence which she had been subjected to], an entire life with dictators, and she transformed [these experiences] when she crossed [the Southbank passage]”. When using Setúbal’s formula, and substituting mathematical symbols for semiotics in performance, I am arguing that this woman (x) and her relationship with Paul (y) who was hitting the wall allowed her to experience a process by which she was violently cared for. It’s important here to note that in Because the Knees Bend, Paul is reticent to label the piece as trauma-focused, as he expresses that trauma, in psychoanalytic theory is something “stuck” (Krenzer: 2024).
In our conversation, he explained to me that the ‘bending of the knees’ within the performance’s title points towards the fluidity of violent energy, something which is capable of both “bending” and “transforming”. In the above-described example, this audience member was able to reach catharsis in participating in Because the Knees Bend. We can take this ‘as read’ (based on Setúbal’s description) of a bilateral effect which the work had on her. This involved both ‘bottom up’ restructuring in which her body was able to experience something which ‘deeply and viscerally contradicted the embodied effect from trauma’, as well as ‘top down’, ‘by talking [and] (re-)connecting with [Paul after her experience in helping her process] the memories of the trauma (Van Der Kolk 2015: 11). Crucially here, both these mechanisms offer a praxis by means of interpreting Paul’s piece as caring.
Earlier on in this essay, I touched on how might Paul[/a] approach self-care whilst demonstrating acts of violent care in their performances? An example of such instances occurred in Setúbal’s piece where he was confronted with another “problem” in this “mathematical equation”. Paul explained to me that during one of the performances: “I remember this guy [...] with his partner [who was] trying to protect the woman [when coming face to face with Setúbal’s violent movements towards the wall]. [...] He walked two steps and then stopp[ed]. And I [wasn’t looking] at him, trying to ignore him, and he start[ed] becoming more angry, more angry”. In this situation, Setúbal stressed that the woman wanted to cross the corridor but was met with her partner’s inclination to “protect” her. As the man declared “I will protect you”, a triangular configuration had become apparent to fellow audience members, watching the performance unfold whilst wondering whether both participants were, in some way, part of Setúbal’s performance (Krenzer: 2024). Setúbal shared with me his concerns within this moment, “he could have attacked me, or grabbed the baton [from my hand”. In practicing self-care, and vital protection, Setúbal decided thereafter that wrapping the baton around his wrist and continuing to avoid eye contact with participants would form part of his work’s constant readjustment. These were important measures to consider for Setúbal, as if the protocol were ‘fixed’, the delicate energetic balance which Because the knees bend strikes could fatally rupture if unplanned and dysregulated violence were to take over the piece.
In my dialogue with Garcia, we discussed her rapport with her collaborators. These co-performers’ job was to throw nails onto Paula’s body, and subsequently to remove her armour, and unpick the scraps which had joined up with her external, protective layer. Thethrashes she received, only hit her outer shell made out metal, but the acoustic reverberations caused by her second skin coming into contact with the nails, suffused the performance space with ripples of violence. However, audiences expressed to Paula in response to this work that in many ways the collaborators were “attacking [her], but also taking care of [her] at the same time” when looking after her outermost layer as she momentarily rested on the floor (see picture 7). This was an act which I considered synonymous of the epistemic act of caring habits, ‘physical practices of knowledge held in the body’ which lend a hand towards the ‘growth and well-being of self and others’ when watching the piece for the very first time (Hamington 2004: 4).
Paula communicated to me in our conversation that “without the collaborators the piece would not exist”, notwithstanding moments of readjustment such as when Garcia had to clearly express to her co-performers: “[be] careful [with] the nails”. The care with which Noise Body’s collaborators had to approach the piece depended on the minutiae of their gestures. By way of illustration, if the nails were thrown with too much force and with an absence of careful violence Paula would get injured, but if the nails were flung towards her, lacking power, the ‘protocol’ would fail in demonstrating its violent care and would render the performance void.
To conclude, both Because the knees bend and Noise Body require a balance between careful violence and violent care. In this essay, I have argued that this binding of such modes strengthens both Paul Setúbal and Paula Garcia’s performances, in caring for audience members (such as myself) who might have encountered forms of violence in their life and inviting them to metabolise these experiences collectively. These sites of dialogic exchange are both corporeal, in the immersive settings which Setúbal and Garcia present at the Southbank centre, but equally take place through online interface. This electronic dimension to such relations, wherein both performers interact with their audiences via e- mails, and through Instagram, (the method which first allowed me to set-up videoconferences with both), gives a new meaning to care in the digital age. As Joan Tronto prescribes, the process of moving away from care as ‘compartmentalised’ and limited to the ‘private sphere’, is one which Setúbal and Garcia take seriously in bursting the metatheatrical bubble in which para-social relations between performers and audiences is far from being one-sided, and instead, continues to be collaborative online (see picture 8; 9). In my writing I have modelled the dictum of ‘personal is political’ in sharing my ongoing journey with post-traumatic stress disorder and the ways in which this has shaped my understanding of care, as a process which can often contain aspects of violence in its more complex configurations. Supporting my arguments with a wide range of sources, including theorists’ writing on ethics of care such as Daniel Engster and Maurice Hamington, as well as literature which looks at the ways in which trauma can be stored in the human body, I aimed to carefully link together different strands of study and scholarly conversation. Equally, I explore how both artists approach self-care and preservation whilst exhibiting acts of violent care through readjustment tactics as well as verbal communication (in this case of Noise Body) with fellow collaborators to avoid injury. Another area of analysis in this essay includes my observations of the aesthetics of violent care and how the deployment of these creative choices invite audiences towards considering these pieces through a personal and embodied perspective. In addition to this, this essay includes two interviews which cumulatively make up over two and a half hours of additional dialogue surrounding Paula Garcia and Paul Setúbal’s performances. Both self-generated primary sources helped me enrich my understanding of both artists’ ethics of care, as well as fostering creative liaisons with those metabolising their experiences of violence in performance.
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