Month of Performance Art Special podcast - reading

Mari Novotny-jones and Joȅl Verwimp read the text "On Fear" and more from the travel diary written by EstheR Neff during her tour with PPL throughout the US last winter.

http://www.culturebot.org/author/panoplylab/

The text "On Fear" was commisioned by Eames Armstrong for PeriOd and My initial response to Esther after the post was…….

Dear Esther thanks so much for your beautiful text. Although I have healthy self-esteem, my ability to appear unafraid isn’t very brilliant. But I guess that’s not really a paradox if I understand you right. Your hope (search) for a territory where fear and conflict are valued by positive confrontations might already be found in your writing itself, which for me performs a question on how to be human (I now understand that I saw the same “household animal who has run wild” connection in your nature fetish performance). For me, the reason for doing performance art is often based on a simple belief that that what I'm doing makes some kind of sense in and of itself. This making of sense hopefully relates/translates further into building a community (friendship and publicness) as a greater and often equally abstract cause and reason for doing performance art. At some point in reading the text (VII) I had the feeling that you were underestimating your own work, not in the sense of your rhetorics or charisma but just as something that clings and turns the people who are present into a witness. To me, this transformation of acts (being) is the materiality of the performance and thus also its relation to fear/unfear (in my case this means sanity, alcoholism, failure, physical deterioration, …). As we know, there is more to fear, love, desire and hope than just natural instinct and our human ability to reason and reflect can bring us to a state of belief (no matter how self deceptive that belief might be) ….