OPEN REHEARSAL

The excluded flesh is a performance / stage installation still in progress, which opens a discussion on the female body, and the stereotypes that cross it and put it in tension. The artificiality that weighs on what is demonized in the construction of the ideal of a perfect, beautiful, successful woman in the social imaginary nowadays. The spotlight is above a deep conflict of generic identity that takes place on the flesh, on the body itself.

Nora is the rebellious protagonist – according to Ibsen and Elfriede Jelinek – who draws the conflict situation between a woman “pillar of her home”, obedient to successful beauty, and her inability to fulfill the expectations of others: living with her husband, being at home, looking like an enameled doll, ready to perform and offer pleasure. It is the result of an environment in which various ancient and contemporary representations have outlined the idea of “the duty” of the female body.

But Nora has long since ceased to be that woman. At least physically. The ups and downs of her body weight, the emotional imbalances produced by imbalances with the body: sometimes a morbid one wrapped up like meat in the supermarket (a cow body), sometimes anorexic – a body that eats lettuce to lose pounds radically – a body-object marked by media power, patriarchal, from the desire for fashion and pornography. They blew their idyllic past into a thousand pieces and make their contradictions different today. Nora is thus the symbol of many female bodies that are confronted with this heavy reality. Still.

She exhibits herself on the stage where she will try to propose a series of questions: what does it mean to be a woman? How does the body talk about fictions and artificial life forms? How is power centralized in the control of bodies, and how is it manipulated, defined, framed? What is the truth: the body, its image, its representation, or the interpretation of this representation in the mind of the public? Nora defines it clearly: “A body is the one that can’t take it anymore”.

She is that new anonymous heroine, forced even to feel disgust for her body and, nevertheless, willing to welcome us with a smile to her slaughterhouse.

Welcome to the exhibition.
Welcome to the kingdom of the excluded flesh.