project image
Sandrine Scheafer
UNTITLED

first performed on October 13, 2017
Boston City Hall Balcony, Boston, MA
performed once in 2017

TOM MAIO

Boston, MA

UNTITLED
TOM MAIO

“Untitled” was a site-specific performance for the Boston City Hall Balcony area. Boston City Hall is a brutalist architectural building which was constructed in 1968. It has been deemed the “ugliest building in the world” by several publications but to a few it is “one of the most beautiful buildings in the world.” I was interested in the experience of viewing the building, how the architecture seemed to expand and contract as you walked under and around it. There seemed to be windows everywhere which made it possible to view my performance from a multitude of perspectives.

For my performance, I created a series of actions that were about the act of looking that I repeated five times with different time lengths. Each sequence began with the action of me holding a 3-yard piece of mesh fabric in front of my body. The fabric has a repeated image from a previous performance of me falling. Some actions were also made to be viewed up close. I placed a mouth expander around my lips, forcing it from side to side, up and down even spinning it around my lips. This distorted my face and exposed the insides of my mouth that normally are not seen. Some actions were repeated within the same sequence but with my shirt over my head, revealing a large white rectangle on the inside of my shirt. Unable to see, this resulted in the actions failing each time. Each sequence always ended abruptly, as to hint that there was more to come. I am interested in repetition and failure as a means of not knowing. Repeating the sequence of actions is a way of removing myself from linear time. The performance ended when I broke the sequence by creating a new action. Ideally, I would have repeated the sequence of actions many more times and because of that, I view this performance as a failure.