In addition to the Car Crash Clan piece I’ll be appearing in with Suka Off, I’ll be on the Torture Garden stage earlier in the night for Rachel Freire’s fashion show/catwalk performance.
Rachel’s last show at Torture Garden was a collaboration with Lady Lucie latex and was basically unlike any fashion show I’d seen before. Check the video to see what I mean, it’s not the best quality but you get a few glimpses of the striking stigmatic special effects.
This time round Rachel is working with both myself and French body modification artist Lukas Zpira, hopefully we will create a piece that’s even more memorable than her Easter show.
So here’s a few pictures from ‘behind the scenes’ at the AMF performance last month. A team of 9 performers, piercers and musicians from 4 different countries came together to create an intense ritual of noise and flesh for the crowd in Nancy. An amazing experience and a great chance to catch up with old friends.
The man himself, Louis Fleischauer, covered in blood and black paint after the show.
Me, backstage, taking pictures in the mirror after my suspension. The most impressive part of my outfit has been removed here but I wanted some shots of the hooks in my back.
Closer (though annoyingly blurry) shot of my hooks and blood. The piercings were all expertly and enjoyably done by Sarge of Metal Fatigue. Love that guy!
This shot has nothing to do with the AMF show but I love it. It’s Clement of Xenomorph -3 in a quick pic I grabbed as he was on the way to shower after performing ‘Vanitas, Omnia Vanitas’. I annoyingly missed his piece so I have no idea what caused all this blood, but I’m planning to see his upcoming performance at Torture Garden Halloween where all will be made clear.
I’ll update again soon with some of the amazing pictures we have of the performance, my costume – which was attached to hooks in my back and face – has to be seen to be believed.
It’s been a while since I travelled overseas to perform, so I’m all kinds of excited and nervous about taking to the stage in France next month for the International Body Art Festival at Souterrain Porte V.
The festival runs from September 25 to October 3, climaxing in a fetish, body art & cabaret night curated by London’s own Torture Garden (Meaning there’ll be a lot of familiar faces over in Nancy that weekend!)
It’s at this event that I’ll be performing, once again working with AMF to create some beautiful chaos with flesh hooks and corsets.
AMF performances are always an enjoyable challenge for me. Every time I team up with the driving force behind the group, Louis Fleischauer, I find myself trying something new, whether it’s discovering the joy of suspending from a spinning rig as I did at Club Antichrist in February, or learning that I am in fact strong enough to handle piercings through my mouth, chest and back all at once, as was the case at the Noise and Blood festival in Poland last year, and of course, I get to do all this whilst wearing Louis’s incredible corset creations.
My feelings about this trip have been pretty mixed, I’m going through a pretty stressful time at the moment and have been questioning whether spending a weekend in another country is really the best idea right now. Things are changing though, and the closer it gets to October 3rd the more I find myself looking forward to it all.
A 30 minute radio programme called ‘The Body of Art‘, which takes a look at the use of the human body in performance art, is available on the BBC website. Unfortunately it’s only online until the 16th June 2009 but I strongly recommend listening to it whilst it’s there.
There’s an interesting focus on the way performance artist such as Orlan and Stelarc are using medical technology and what the show calls ‘genetic engineering’ (I have no idea if this is the correct term) to push the boundaries of art and science.
There’s also a short segment on Marina Abramovic in which she talks about her infamous Rhythm 0 performance (during which a member of the audience held a loaded gun to Marina’s head) and an interview with Franko B in which he talks about the way 80′s politics influenced his early work. Interestingly Franko says that if he knew then what he knows now, he wouldn’t have done those early blood letting performances as they have become the pieces that define him. I can see his point, it can’t be much fun constantly being seen as ‘that bleeding guy’ when that’s just a small part of the work you do.
