2005

Sofia City Art Gallery

My partner stitches my body into my mirror image with a surgical thread. The audience is located behind the mirror and can see only my arm and leg that are stuck through the mirror. The action can also be watched on a monitor placed nearby. The video feed comes from a camera mounted on my partner’s head. In the end, the audience is invited to come over to my side of the mirror and see me.

As we were working on the piece, we thought about illustrating the relationship between reality and the virtual world.  Both worlds affect each other, they build and construct each other, but sometimes we don’t want the virtual world to expose some of our qualities or personal biography. The virtual therefore is not us, so often this connection and constant exchange is not necessarily a unity, but rather often a painful dependence.

SZ-ZS Performance can also be looked at as a visual embodiment of Lacan’s “imaginary, symbolic and real.” The piece is an attempt to expose these three concepts simultaneously. If “the imaginary” is our body, and “the symbolic” is our mirror image, then “the real” will be the inconceivable, physically non-existing border between the mirror reflection and the flesh of the artist. The attempt to reify this non-physical connection is painful and infeasible.

This performance is made by Boryana Rossa and ULTRAFUTURO (Oleg Mavromatti, Katia Damianova, Anton Terziev, Miroslav Dimitrov).