Raphael Couto

I think of my body as a site of branding, where reinterpretations of the world are produced. The body is where we digest the perceptions of the world and where we regurgitate them, producing traces on the skin, inside and around us.

In “Vertigo,” I think of these traces as a form of destruction. In the performance, I chew the homonymous book by W.G. Sebald, in which the author, blending image and text, recounts his experiences of traveling and his discomfort when feeling dizziness.

By chewing and vomiting the text, I think about this vertigo as experience: the difficulty of chewing a hundred pages, destroying a text and turning it into saliva, choosing a text that is not random or vague, but that adds complexity to the work.

The process is also important; I put the paper into my mouth and chew it until my mouth no longer supports the text, then I vomit, and return to chewing. I repeat this until the book is finished. The cyclical process pushes the limits of the body, the limits of the word, the limits of the public.