FAMILY PROJECT
Installation Sanctity Tests
Date
21
30 June 2019
Location
Casa Azotea Nave 10
Price
Free entrance
Format
Institution
Naves Matadero
Through his intimate performance art pieces, drawings, photographs, videos, musical compositions and artist’s books, Portuguese artist Miguel Bonneville offers us a journey through his autobiographical stories that focus on the deconstruction and reconstruction of identity.
Ever since 2003, he has presented his work in national and international art galleries and festivals such SESC – Santos de Brazil, the Open International Performance Art Festival in China or at the Galician Centre for Contemporary Art. And in his series of performance art pieces of the same name, Miguel Bonneville (2006-2012), he killed his alter ego, the fiction of himself, making it necessary to create a clear differentiation between his old Self and his new Self. He decided to cross out his first name. “Bonneville is a name with no gender; it’s neither male nor female, and that coincides with my own gender which is not defined by either of these two”, he explains. Crossing out his name reveals and affirms a transition but maintains the mark of a clear identity.
In his serial project Family Project (2007-2009), Bonneville created drawings, installations, films and shows, based on the idea of family, exhibiting the past in the present, showing its origins, its context and the permanent marks of childhood traumas (“the family as a place of destruction par excellence, as the essence of evil”, says Bonneville). They were fragments of his attempts to understand how our origins, our education and the past, impose themselves on us and shape us. And how casting off these very impositions becomes a Herculean task.
In 2018, he returned to this project with the performance art piece Future Suicide, “returning to an incisive analysis that crosses time: the adult of today proposes killing the child that was -the child who designed him precisely for that purpose-, leaving a space in which to create true childhood: the childhood of the future”, he explains.
Having murdered (or suicided) the child, in Sanctity Tests Miguel Bonneville makes a proposal that differs from previous ones. Created for the rooftop house as an installation and a performance with only one person in the audience at a time, who has to ask for an appointment on the web. “Sanctity Tests has its origin in an extension of the family, of a figure who is always present, who surpasses the reputation of the blood: Goretti. Second mother, guardian angel, protector, an absolutely inescapable figure in my life, who with one blow opened the stagnant and stinking heart of my dying bourgeois home. The rooftop house will become an intimate space, a possible refuge, a flight from our family homes, ghost houses: places of horror and of all suicidal impulses. In is in this house -a spatial, psychological and spiritual place- where I hope my visitors can awaken their loves that are impossible to domesticate, where they can be wounded figures. And where together (and also separately), although wounded, we can head off in the direction of a nameless night”.
In collaboration with:
Ever since 2003, he has presented his work in national and international art galleries and festivals such SESC – Santos de Brazil, the Open International Performance Art Festival in China or at the Galician Centre for Contemporary Art. And in his series of performance art pieces of the same name, Miguel Bonneville (2006-2012), he killed his alter ego, the fiction of himself, making it necessary to create a clear differentiation between his old Self and his new Self. He decided to cross out his first name. “Bonneville is a name with no gender; it’s neither male nor female, and that coincides with my own gender which is not defined by either of these two”, he explains. Crossing out his name reveals and affirms a transition but maintains the mark of a clear identity.
In his serial project Family Project (2007-2009), Bonneville created drawings, installations, films and shows, based on the idea of family, exhibiting the past in the present, showing its origins, its context and the permanent marks of childhood traumas (“the family as a place of destruction par excellence, as the essence of evil”, says Bonneville). They were fragments of his attempts to understand how our origins, our education and the past, impose themselves on us and shape us. And how casting off these very impositions becomes a Herculean task.
In 2018, he returned to this project with the performance art piece Future Suicide, “returning to an incisive analysis that crosses time: the adult of today proposes killing the child that was -the child who designed him precisely for that purpose-, leaving a space in which to create true childhood: the childhood of the future”, he explains.
Having murdered (or suicided) the child, in Sanctity Tests Miguel Bonneville makes a proposal that differs from previous ones. Created for the rooftop house as an installation and a performance with only one person in the audience at a time, who has to ask for an appointment on the web. “Sanctity Tests has its origin in an extension of the family, of a figure who is always present, who surpasses the reputation of the blood: Goretti. Second mother, guardian angel, protector, an absolutely inescapable figure in my life, who with one blow opened the stagnant and stinking heart of my dying bourgeois home. The rooftop house will become an intimate space, a possible refuge, a flight from our family homes, ghost houses: places of horror and of all suicidal impulses. In is in this house -a spatial, psychological and spiritual place- where I hope my visitors can awaken their loves that are impossible to domesticate, where they can be wounded figures. And where together (and also separately), although wounded, we can head off in the direction of a nameless night”.
In collaboration with: