SKINDEEP, a new multidisciplinary performance night, asks what happens when bodies become undone
In pictures: SKINDEEP
“The plural of grief is us.” By the time Trace Polly speaks these words, I’ve already witnessed another woman enter the crowd with blood dripping from wounds around her navel. Now, a guitar hangs from her waist. Polly pulls a horsehair bow across its strings, alternating between moments of near silence and vocals that fill the warehouse. “Let us become the archive, the witness, the one that does not forget,” she says. At some point, a vibrator is taken to the guitar. Somehow, it doesn’t feel particularly out of place.
This is SKINDEEP, a new multidisciplinary performance night founded by collaborators Hugh Gleeson, gh0re.grl and Luke Tackaberry. Bringing together performance, sound and spatial installation, the project explores how bodies are shaped by the environments they inhabit, and what happens when the space around us becomes part of the performance itself. Rather than simply filling Berlin’s 1,100-square-metre Haus der Visionäre with installations, its organisers wanted to build a world of their own. “A space can transform the experience for a viewer,” explains spatial designer Gleeson. “You can create these worlds of freedom, or these fucked up worlds.”
SKINDEEP exists somewhere between the two. Four installations carve an arena out of the warehouse as performances emerge from the crowd and installations come alive around us; our bodies become part of the architecture too. It’s a world that doesn’t exactly look safe. A six-metre-wide steel structure balances on twelve handmade spikes, each sharpened to a 1mm point, while a DJ booth hangs suspended above it all. Brutality is built into the architecture, but so is a strange fragility – much of it looks as though it could hurt you just as easily as it could fall apart.
The first bodies within belong to Post Organic Bauplan, emerging through smoke into a composition by Oliver Torr and becoming entangled in a biomechanical mass. Pavel Milyakov follows with ambient drones and guitar, briefly slowing the pulse before SKINDEEP turns towards something more visceral. Dressed in a translucent latex skirt and white underwear, gh0re.grl enters the crowd already wounded, blood running from around her navel. Three sheets of latex hang nearby, marked with poetry reflecting the past, present and future. The outer two project childhood footage and scenes of self-injury, while a live projection in the centre magnifies her movements. Slowly, she passes a needle and thread through her skin, stitching herself back together.
“It’s an active repair, but it’s a really brutal one,” she tells me. Conceived almost a year earlier in response to trauma, stitching became a metaphor for putting a fractured self back together. By the time she finally performed it, she was no longer quite the person who had written it. “It was so me, but it’s not me right now,” she says. Rather than abandon the piece, she allowed it to change with her. Elsewhere, grief takes a different form.
Trace Polly’s eulogy to lost siblings moves through repetition, remembrance and the slow accumulation of time. There’s a sense of using whatever tools remain at our disposal to communicate something that words alone cannot: a voice, a vibration, a length of horsehair. “Silence becomes language,” Polly tells the seated crowd. Across the room, something seemingly dead begins to move.
In his first-ever durational piece, Shalva Nikvashvili has spent the whole evening draped in a pool of blood and sweat beside a broken stripper pole, blonde hair caught where the metal has bisected. While designing the installation, Nikvashvili told Gleeson: “Your role now is basically my pimp, and you’re making a pole for me to die on.” Eventually, the body stirs. What the team later calls “a little resurrection” sees Nikvashvili slowly return to life.
Dafni Krazoudi’s Guilty takes that transformation back to the earth. Dressed in Ann Demeulemeester selected by Voo Store, she begins with an almost childlike playfulness towards guilt, circling a mound of earth in heels as fragments of memory surface and disappear. She drinks, strips and sinks towards the soil, spilling wine across herself and the earth in something between baptism and burial. Yet the playfulness returns: echoes of mother-and-child voices fill the space as guilt becomes something to toy with, bury and dig back up again.
By the end of the night, the distinction between vulnerability and strength feels increasingly difficult to maintain. Gleeson describes the tension at the centre of gh0re.grl’s performance as one of “brutality and fragility”, but it runs through SKINDEEP as a whole. Bodies bleed, strain, strip, heal and return to the earth, never presented as pristine or complete. Instead, beauty emerges through their capacity to change: to be marked by an experience and continue transforming afterwards.