A version of this essay was presented at the VIII Central American Congress of Cultural Studies, Vulcanoamerica: resistance, fissures, escapes, held virtually on October 13, 14 and 15, 2021, based at the Rafael Landívar University in Guatemala.
1Since 1911, when Dada events and Futurist productions were staged at Cabaret Voltaire in Switzerland, the performance's aesthetics was based on concepts such as immediacy and the presence of the body. Throughout the 20th century, performance was seen as a non-traditional way of making art, continuously dealing with the living presence of an interpreter or interpreters. The vitality, the physical movement, and the impermanence of the action in the space were seen as disruptive alternatives contrasting with the static permanence of painting and sculpture (Tate Modern, sf).
2In 1976, the publication of "Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present" by RoseLee Goldberg instituted a field for studying this artistic practice. For this author, the very nature of performance art escapes an exact or simple definition beyond the mere declaration that performance is only the living art; that is, it requires the presence of the artists (Goldberg, 1988).
- 1 Jonah Westerman. Between Action and Image: Performance as ‘Inframedium’. Disponible en (...)
3In 1993, Peggy Phelan affirmed that the performance event is inevitably ephemeral and unique and that it cannot be saved or recorded since it disappears after its conclusion. Because of this, she wrote: "the only life of performance is the present,"; and this "cannot be saved, recorded, documented because it becomes something other than a performance" (Westerman, J.)1.
- 2 Ibid. Traducción libre de las autoras.
4For Phelan, a work of performance art only exists for the duration of its staging. The performances that are done again are entirely different works, and any documentation or mediation can only point retrospectively to what once was but is no longer (Westerman, J.). Phelan affirms that the value of performances lies in their disappearance. For this reason, neither a record nor a copy can exist. However, theorists like Philip Auslander argue that documentation is what creates a performance in the first place. In 2006 he wrote: "Documentation does not simply generate images/statements that autonomously describe a performance and claim that it occurred: just as a performance does, it produces an event" (Westerman, J.).2
5For this author, the essence of live performance is the immediate contact between the performers and the public, which requires a physical presence. Performances are carried out in front of an audience that recognizes them and even gives them meaning. For authors such as Auslander, the effect produced by the record is precisely where the performance is located and concludes (Westerman, J.):
- 3 Ibid. Translation by the authors.
It may well be that our sense of the pieces' presence, power, and authenticity comes not from conceiving the document as an indexed access point to a past event, but from perceiving the document itself as a performance that reflects directly the aesthetic project and the sensibility of an artist, one of which we are the current audience.3
- 4 Ibid. Translation by the authors.
6The reference to the physical presence has been a constant in most accepted definitions of performance, and it remains crucial in defining this practice. However, theorists argue that this activity is not limited exclusively to the ephemeral presence of the artist's body but also includes the documentation processes. The documentation creates a performance, as it does not simply generate images that autonomously refer to a performance that occurred but produces another event by itself (Westerman, J.).4
7The documentation, registration, and archiving of performance have generated a vigorous global discussion about the relationship between performance art, documentation, and the ephemeral. The theoretical arguments behind this debate have focused on the need to rethink the bodily presence as an essential part of the performances and the need to expand its limits to do justice to the phenomenological complexity of performance art.
8A crucial aspect in these arguments is the relevance that archives have acquired for this practice, both as the receiving site of documentation and for their capacity to become a live resource for re-contextualizing history and memory based on the documents and materials they keep.
9In relation to this discussion, the performance "Don't tell my right hand what my left hand does" by Costa Rican artist Marton Robinson (1979) analyzed in this essay, stages a particular case study because it expands the diversity of meanings and strategies around video installation performances. Robinson uses his body as a living archive and challenges the traditional conceptions of the role of documenting and filming the performance, thus contributing to the debate about how this artistic practice is recorded, documented, and archived. Robinson's work also presents an interesting case to address the fine line between the definition of performance and the immediacy of the body in a particular time and space, and the purpose and definition of the resulting testimony of the live-action.
- 5 Personal communication with Miguel A. López with Gabriela Sáenz-Shelby in 2016.
10Robinson is one of the most prominent young Latin American artists, and has an interdisciplinary background. In his work, he is interested in exposing the “nuances present in the Afro-Latino experience, enriching the critical discourse of contemporary works of the African Diaspora.” For curator Miguel A. López, “Marton Robinson has been exploring ways of challenging conventional black representations of identity and ethnicity from the notion of art history, history, politics, mass media, popular culture and religion. His work attempts to create new discourses using mockery and symbolism in relation to how black identity was constructed by colonialism and how this perception is engraved in the psyche of his native Costa Rica.” 5
Fig1. Marton Robinson with his work. By Esteban Lobo.
11Being from Latin America, and more specifically, from Central America, Robinson's performative work contributes to the international performance scene through his work and from a particular place of enunciation. Some affinities and similarities can be found between his artistic work and that of contemporary artists from the region, such as Regina José Galindo, Benvenuto Chavajay, Javier Calvo, Priscilla Monge, Patricia Belli, Jhafis Quintero, to mention just a few cases in which the use of the body is central.
- 6 Translation by the authors.
12Pancho López, who has researched performance artists and works in Central America, points out that an essential reference in the work carried out in the region is the political use of the body as a space of dissent and resistance. This is how the body and the artistic actions build "a visual language that serves as a way of saying what cannot be said with words"6 (López, 2021:130). In Central America, this is due to authoritarian and coercive regimes present in the region conditioning and repressing freedom of expression.
13Central America is characterized by its ethnic, administrative, and geographical diversity, with complex historical, social and political processes, some traumatic and very violent. In these conditions, the body plays a crucial role in synthesizing, registering, and confronting aspects of the experience of living in these societies. Performative actions enable the generation of repertoires to transmit macrosocial reflections that question, confront and purge what has been experienced.
14Concerning this, Richard (65) has stated that:
- 7 Nelly Richard. "The rhetoric of the body=Las retóricas del cuerpo." In Margins and Institutions: ar (...)
The body is the physical agent of the structures of everyday experience. It is the producer of dreams, the transmitter and receiver of cultural messages, a creature of habits, a desiring machine, a repository of memories, an actor in the theatre of power, a tissue of affects and feelings. Because the body is at the boundary between biology and society, between drives and discourse, between sexual and its categorization in terms of power, biography and history, it is the site par excellence for transgressing the constraints of meaning or what social discursivity prescribes as normality.7
15Robinson's work activates considerations on identity issues and racism and how they are rooted in Costa Rican society. A country where ethnic discrimination by a segment of the population is still present. Its origins date back, as in other Latin American countries, to the colonial era and it became part of the imagined national community after the Independence in 1821. According to data from the 2011 census carried out by the National Institute of Statistics and Censuses, ethnically, Costa Rica has a large white/mestizo majority (83.63% of the population), which is why many Costa Ricans still feel that the country's population is homogenous and of European descendance very different from an indigenous, mestizo Central America. Younger generations are aware that Costa Ricans are multicultural which is why cases of racism are less common amongst them.
16Taking this into consideration, lines of analysis are presented concerning the potential inherent to contemporary artistic practices to generate critical approaches around traumatic historical processes that have determined models of knowledge, identities, and homogenizing official national imaginaries, particularly in Latin America and Central America.
17To deepen the analysis and address some of Robinson's perceptions and actions in relation to this negated history and its dire consequences, we need to refer to the two editions of the performance "Don't tell my right hand what my left hand does." The first performance was presented at the 21st Biennial of Contemporary Art Sesc VideoBrasil, Brazil, in 2019. The action was documented by a team led by the artist and edited by himself, resulting in the video-installation performance that was part of the exhibition "Thorny Horizon" (Sáenz Shelby, G & Vindas Solano, S, 2021) that took place at the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design between January and April 2021 in Costa Rica. The second time the performance was held was within the framework of the same exhibition, three months after the show was inaugurated. The possibility of coexisting with both versions in the same exhibition opened unexpected paths of reception and interpretation of the work, which added layers of meaning to the video-installation performance and the exhibition itself. This deliberation results from our experience as curators and mediators that witnessed Robinson's performance.
18"Thorny Horizon" was an exhibition that brought together works by artists who departed from their vulnerability and put forward diverse attitudes of resistance and survival strategies to face the uncertainty that characterizes contemporary life and the multiplicity of local and global crises. The exhibition was articulated through three thematic axes (Sáenz Shelby, G & Vindas Solano, S). Robinson's video-installation performance was incorporated as part of the third axis, "The poetics of the end: strategies to resist and conjure a better future." This axis grouped artistic proposals that evidenced acute awareness of their time, supported artistic practices, presented alternative ways to record or alleviate the obstacles of daily life, visualize possibilities to survive, and resist through magical thinking, memory and subjectivity. Robinson's work was a testimonial record from his body, from which he challenged the official cultural representations reproduced socially and culturally; his contribution to the axis of the exhibition was crucial, as detailed in the catalog of the exhibition (Sáenz Shelby, G & Vindas Solano, S: 48):
- 8 Translated from the catalog by the authors.
The body as an untamed territory, allows these artists to claim their subjectivities, their deepest desires and fears. Through their artistic practice, they reaffirm a vocation to be witnesses of reality, to capture, through this exercise, what happens in their environment, both social and intimate. This exploration allows them, in some way, to take ownership of the difficulties they are going through, digest them and master them. In their work, the act of looking is, in turn, an act of reaffirmation of being, in all its diversity and in all its contradictions8.
19Hence, in "Don't tell my right hand what my left hand does”, Robinson works with his own body as a space of self-determination and as a vital act to challenge stereotypes, inequality, and prejudices based on irrational imaginary claims of a predominantly European and Caucasian population. The body becomes a means of communication and territory of dispute and resistance. It serves as a memory receptacle of his African, Antillean, and Costa Rican ancestors and also for his own.
20In Robinson's works, the body functions as a catalyst to break into the perverse social structures that have articulated racism and social discrimination. In light of this artistic determination, each of his performances involves the public: they are witnesses of his intense bodily act through which he transmits the memory of pain and impotence in the face of discrimination and self-determination of persistence and resistance. With his feat, Robinson addresses core identity issues without ignoring that, with his actions, he is evoking the tremendous duality that exists between cultural and personal memory, both trying to cope with a past that has been repeatedly erased and denied.
21Pertinent to this is what Nelly Richard points out (Richard, 1986, 65), when she says:
- 9 Nelly Richard. "The rhetoric of the body=Las retóricas del cuerpo." In Margins and Institutions: ar (...)
The body is the stage on which this division primarily leaves its mark. It is the meeting-place of the individual (or one's biography and unconscious) and the collective (or the programming of the roles of identity according to the norms of social discipline). That is why its utilization as a support for art practice entails the dismantling of the ideological use of the body as a vehicle for images or representations of the rituals of day-to-day living, as a material bearer of the means of social reproduction and the models of sexual domination.9
22Although Robinson synthesizes and communicates actions and gestures with his movements, the daily experiences through his own body as an individual with Afro-Latino descendant roots from Central America, his performances pose problems and reflections that resonate globally.
23As stated, Robinson's video-installation performance piece "Don't tell my right hand what my left hand does" challenges some of the traditional conceptions of performance and contributes to the diversity of meanings about what this artistic practice can communicate through the body. This condition responds to the centrality that documenting and filming have in his work, a task in which the artist is intensively involved, watching over every detail of the process. For Robinson, the documentation of his work is as relevant as the live performance, each aiming to transmit and communicate knowledge about being black in Costa Rica, thus dismantling the existence of the myth of a predominantly ethnically white population still present in this society.
24For Robinson, the documentation process begins with preparing the live-action. The notion of documenting, registering, and archiving is fundamental in the preparatory methodology of his performance and the actual activity of the performative action. Three documentation processes can be sectioned in the whole process, generating very different experiences and artistic outcomes. The first one is the planning for the conceptual design of the drawing that the artist will erase. The motifs used for his drawings are part of the artist's research and personal archive. The second is the performative action itself, and finally, the filing and documentation of it, all of which reflect the intrinsic complexity that characterizes his work.
Fig2. Marton Robinson before his performance. By Sofia Vindas Solano and Gabriela Sáens Shelby (2021)
25Robinson's first act is drawing a saturated mural with white chalk on a black surface. This process can take one or two days. This action is done without an audience. The mural depicts a series of identity representation codes of the African diaspora intertwined with others from Costa Rica. With African references, such as sculptures, and statuettes, the design was also created by using specific allusions from the official traditions of Costa Rica, such as the drawing of the statue of the patron saint of Costa Rican Catholicism, the iconic Virgin of the Angels. The original figurine, popularly known as “La Negrita” depicts both, a Caucasian Virgin and a child. In endearing terms, La Negrita means “little black lady”, and this term responds to the fact that the statue was carved in three different dark stones. The legend of this small figurine is anchored in local traditions that state that it was found in 1635 by a mestizo girl named Juan Pereira from "Puebla de los pardos" a section of the city of Cartago known by its mestizo population (mulattos, blacks, among others). The finding was interpreted as a sacred will of the Virgin to build a church in the locality.
26The second performative act is filmed in front of an audience. The action begins when the artist enters the space and asks someone in the audience to tie his right hand on the back of his body. He then proceeds to erase what he drew on the wall with his left hand, gradually involving various parts of his body as the action evolves, such as his torso, thighs, head, and face. At the end of the performance (one hour later), what remains on the wall is a whitish stain produced by the mixture of chalk and sweat. The wall where these actions took place can be understood as a physical vestige of the action, even as an art object by itself.
27The final action is the projection of the edited performance video (in a loop), over the remaining whitish stain on the wall after the action. The loop becomes a strategy to focus on the futility of erasing the past and the identity signs it contains. With each repetition, Robinson insistently reprints the image of what has been erased over the stain, highlighting the impossibility of erasing history and at the same time reactivating the insistent action of doing so, thus evoking the persistence of memory. The performative act presents a disturbing contradiction: the intensive work that the artist dedicated to the design and realization of the drawing on the wall is annulled and denied by himself with his act of erasing it.
28In the two editions of the work (Brazil and Costa Rica), the context of enunciation played an essential role in the design of the performance. For each case, the artist devised different ways that show how space can alter what the artist wants to communicate. In the case of Brazil, Robinson proposed a drawing based on a universal iconography of the exoticization of the black figure, such as a series of African ornaments, statuettes, vegetation, and floral motifs. In the edition made in Costa Rica, the artist used local references. He resorted to the famous book "El Negro en Costa Rica," published in 1972 by the historian Carlos Meléndez and the writer Quince Duncan, to represent how Afro-descendant history and racism have developed on Costa Rican soil. In both cases, the artist used an image of the Virgin of Los Angeles, or "La Negrita," as a central figure.
29Following the original sculpture, in Robinson´s version, the Virgin is a black woman that carries a child in her arms that looks like "Cocori," the famous Caribbean-Costa Rican character from the book of the same name by Costa Rican writer Joaquín Gutiérrez Mangel and illustrated by Hugo Díaz. This book, published in 1947, has generated discussions in some circles and, in cases, seems controversial due to the way the interaction between a white girl and Cocori, a black boy with curly hair, is depicted and narrated. For example, the girl refers to Cocori as seemingly dirty because of the color of his skin. Albeit, some scholars have explained this as having to do with the social and ideological context in which it was written.
30Combining these two references, the original figurine of the Virgin and the book illustrations by Díaz, the drawing created by Robinson depicts a black Virgin holding Cocori in her arms, mimicking the illustrations of the book as a small boy with big lips and curly hair.
31Once the performative action is over, the artist retains the audience, like static prisoners, with the immobility of his body facing the wall and his agitated and panting breath, which remains as the only vestige of what has just happened. Gradually, his panting begins to slow down after its accelerated rhythm. Then, Robinson turns to face the audience head-on, placing them as witnesses as he shows his open hand, showing the whitish chalk stain impregnated on his skin, face, palm, and torso. Then his hand contracts into a fist that rises, signaling strength and power. The fist catches and simultaneously hides the chalk stain within to deny or forget the action he has just carried out. The panting breath decreases until silence prevails in the room for several minutes. After his performance scene, his feet leave a trail of white footprints as a grim reminder of what the audience witnessed.
Fig3. The drawing before the performance. By Fabian H. Mena(2021)
32For the Costa Rican edition, and perhaps still as part of the performance, Robinson organized an emotional reunion with his family, the curators, participants from the audience present, and friends, who shared and enjoyed snacks selected especially for the occasion by the artist himself.
33Superimposed like a palimpsest, the images, and designs that the artist himself draws and later erases with his skin echo a living archive of identities, symbols, and layers of history with which the artist wishes to interact with his body.
34It is interesting to measure the depth of the actions carried out by Robinson during the performance in front of the public. The first approach to his movements and actions during this act could be understood as various intentions that converge simultaneously in space but revolve in different orbits around the epicenter of the activity, namely the blackboard on which the artist creates the drawing to erase.
35In orbit closest to the surface, a first determining action takes place; this is the struggle that the artist wages with himself during the performance. Robinson rubs the slate with his skin and with the palm of his hand. Frantically he erases the drawing on the surface. This first action does not entirely erase the image but instead creates a white spot that barely clouds the visibility of the drawing. Robinson uses his face, arms, torso, and all of his body to erase and clean the intervened surface with his sweat. With occasional but insistent jumps and reaching out with his free hand, the artist reaches the corners and borders of the space he must erase. As the exasperating, agitated repetition tires his body, the sweat mixes with the chalk, and the drawing begins to disappear completely.
36In a more distant orbit is the public witnessing the action. Above all, the public listens to the agitated and gasping breath of the artist. The connection generated between the artist and the public is crucial; it is enveloping. Somehow, the audience is affected by Robinson's ordeal, by his exhaustion, his painful panting, and his forced breathing that reveal a frustrated, desperate body, trapped between his skin and the action of erasing.
37Robinson's work integrates and uses archival references and documents in his act and uses his body as a living archive to revisit history and bring forth aspects that deal with memory and identity traits rooted in Costa Rican society.
38This topic of documentation, registration, and archiving performance has generated a rich discussion on the global scenario about the relationship between performance art, documentation, and the ephemeral. The theoretical argument behind this debate has focused on the need to rethink bodily presence as an essential part and expand its limits to do justice to the phenomenological complexity of performance art. In this sense, the video-installation performance "Don't tell my right hand what my left hand does" and the corresponding performance provide elements to understand the vertices that cross this discussion.
39There seems to be a consensus that performance has expanded the limits of art itself since its inception and that it circumscribes and focuses on physical presence and the temporary and ephemeral action of performers in front of an audience. The presence of the body remains crucial in defining this practice; however, this activity is not limited exclusively to the ephemeral existence of the artist's body but also documentation and records of the performance.
40In this sense, archives have acquired relevance for this practice, both as the receiving site of documentation and their capacity to become a living resource that allows the re-contextualizing of history and memory from the documents and materials it protects. Robinson's work integrates these possibilities into his creation in a complex way.
41Accordingly, it is vital to conceive the relationship between performance and archives as unique systems within which the processes of recording, editing, storage, indexing, and redistribution are as important a part of the work as the performance itself. This action is specifically evident in Robinson's work. The recording is part of the work. Projecting the video over the performance`s remains, diffuses the line between the action and its record.
42The will to "archive" or document performances responds to both the public and the artist's desire to return to the gestures, the steps, sweat, images, words, and sounds performed by the artist, and it is possible as all of it has been registered to employ the documentation.
Fig4. What remains after the performance. By Fabian H. Mena (2021)
43Diana Taylor has extensively addressed the issue of the archive concerning performances. She points out the relevance of generating a "repertoire" of knowledge from the archive and states that this repertoire works through the body and its presence, a condition that she calls "embodied practice." (Taylor, D., 2003). The repertoire is embodied in the artists' body; through their performative action in front of an audience, they can bring out alternative perspectives, such as the historical processes of transnational exchange experienced in Latin America at different moments.
44Taylor invites us to remap the memory of the Americas in time and space through embodied practices based on archives. For the author, performances can become “acts of transfer," through which cultural codes, strategies, and forms of new, old, denied, or disappeared knowledge can be transmitted. Convincingly, Robinson's performative work, as an embodied repertoire, can provide alternative or subversive ways of looking at and understanding black history in the Americas and the processes of colonization of the continent in many different ways.
- 10 Costinaş, Cosmin and Janevski, Ana (ed). Is the Living Body the Last Thing Left Alive? The New Perf (...)
- 11 Some authors in these discussions are: Glusberg, Jorge. A Arte da Performance. São Paulo: Perspecti (...)
45Through performative explorations, use of archives and documentation, and consequently, in response to the diversity, richness, and multiplicity of performances in the global arena, attention has been paid to the specificity of the places where performances are enunciated thus departing from the European and predominantly American narrative approach. This condition has created a place to explore the diversity of artistic positions concerning current performance, manifested from various parts of the world (Costinaş, C. & Janevski, A. 2017)10 and specifically from Latin American11.
46Art historians from different parts of the world have contributed by tracing the various genealogies of performances in art galleries and public spaces, starting from non-Western histories, which have been recovered, translated, integrated, and sometimes excluded from the new institutional realities of contemporary art. These investigations have contributed with inserts that create narratives that point out and expand the limits of what is possible in the concepts of current artistic practices and performance.
Fig5. The final moments of the performance. By Fabian H. Mena (2021)
47In this history, Robinson can be conceived as a particular case in these genealogies of performance, rooting his native Central America and its historical and cultural diversity in his work. In this specific region, performances have had their codes, which generally broaden the meanings of performance practices, and Robinson's work provides new elements that could offer new perspectives on his contribution to the history of this practice on a global scale. With his performance, Robinson work is making an attempt to remap some aspects of the Central American African legacy, and its colonization history.
- 12 Translation by the authors.
48In the artist's own words, Latin American history and context is key in his piece: “The proposal encompasses multiple concepts and ideas. ❲it❳ confronts the Costa Rican, Central American and Latin American perspective in the historicization of the concept of nation. The work seeks the opening of a dialogue, on the insertion and consolidation of the identity of Black people in a broader national narrative. Likewise, it seeks to vindicate the exploitation of Afro-descendant peoples in the establishment of the economies of the Americas” (Robinson, 2022)12.
- 13 Translation by the authors.
49The African legacy in this region has been an eluded and secretive affair. The presence of African descendants in history books has been relegated to the Afro-Antillean diaspora of the XX century, even though it has been well documented that Africans arrived in Central America both as slaves and as free individuals as early as the time of European colonization in the XVI Century. According to Carlos Agudelo, “Central America had a significant presence of populations of African origin during the colonial period. According to some statistical approximations, Central American Afro-descendants currently make up 42% of the total population in Panama, 36% in Belize, 9% in Nicaragua and Honduras, 4% in Costa Rica and 1% in Guatemala. These populations have had differentiated processes in terms of their arrival in the region, their insertion in national societies and the forms of affirmation of their identity” (Agudelo, 2017: 201)13.
50Lowell Gudmundson states that, “During almost two centuries of independent life, the “public secret" of African heritage and ancestry in practically all Central American ruling families had to be covered by a heavy cloak of silence due to the needs of their self-presentation as number partners of civilization. and its concert of nations, whose leaders, without exception, were not and could not be, "publicly" at least, Afro-Americans” (Gudmundson, 2009: 6).
51This process of concealing the black population´s contribution and history, has taken place in several ways by editing the official history of Central American nations and omitting or even erasing the black and African presence of the official records. This denial is verified in the archival evidence used by historians to study this subject. For example, archives such as census statistics, show how officials often backtracked, rewrote and whitened population statistics, by editing racial categories if needed (Gudmundson, 2009).
52In the XX and XXI centuries, black and Afro-Antillean populations have been relegated to lack of structural opportunities in the heavily racist societies of Central America. In the case of Costa Rica Lara Putnam has analyzed that “There are two basic factors that have historically weighed negatively on the population of Afro-Antillean descent in this country. On the one hand, prejudice of the population that is considered "white". On the other, the global situation of the Huétar Atlántico (Caribbean) region, where the levels of private investment have been drastically cyclical, and where investment in infrastructure and services has followed a slow course, because the expansion of public services has been very slow in comparison with the Central Valley” (Putnam: 387).
53Therefore, the generalized problem that this population faces responds to the constant denial of a history of more than 500 years of African presence in Central America. This condition has triggered the constant socio-economic obstacles that hinder the population from actively inserting themselves in society as equals of their fellow citizens.
54In the process of his performance, Robinson amasses, inscribes, and materializes a living reservoir of the multiple and diverse stories of the Afro Latino population in his body. His actions and corporality can transmit knowledge about the thousands of experiences of human beings who were subjected to forms of slavery, discrimination, violence, and racism.
- 14 Pancho López, “Centro América en Acción”. Museo de Arte y Diseño Contemporáneo, (Costa Rica, 2021): (...)
- 15 Translation by the authors.
55Robinson's work summons the history of thousands of Afro Caribbean populations from the continent. Beyond the subjective consideration implied by Robinson's relationship with what he calls his "blackness," it is possible to glimpse other concerns about the artist's subjectivity. Pancho López has pointed out that "with this piece, he reflects on how his body feels that, in certain contexts, he is an artist, but when walks down the street he does not stop being an ordinary person, amid societies of equitable constructions in terms of ethnicity and gender"(López, 2021:130)14 15.
56The organization before acting and the systematization of the experience from its conception to its culmination carried out by the artist are phases that become part of the artistic work carried out by Robinson. The photographs and filmed documentation conspire to expand the communication possibilities of the ephemeral action during the performance. But the re-creation of the video projection actions over the stained wall is constituted as layers of the same epidermis of the conceptual artwork. All phases of the process entail the same level of precision, conception, and planning by the artist and his team, making the work accessible from various angles and times, either in its parts or its entirety, as it happened in "Thorny Horizon." By presenting the video-installation performance to new audiences and updating it with another live performance, Robinson adds new layers of meaning to his work, which will have unique audiences and diverse moments of experience that can be interpreted from the open questions that move the artist and are raised by him. Each performance presentation works as a series of moments chained and linked together indissolubly. All these processes form an integral part of "Don't tell my right hand what my left hand is doing," whether as a record, documentation, an action with two editions, or a living archive.
57As analyzed in this essay, the video-installation performance "Don't tell my right hand what my left hand does" presents a particular case of performance art in Central America. It addresses and complicates the various meanings, definitions and possibilities of this artistic practice globally. In short, this work contributes to the current discussion on performance, its documentation, vestiges, ways of archiving, and the immediacy of live-action.
- 16 Bojana Kunst, “The Troubles with Temporality,” Stedelijk Studies Journal 3 (2015), p. 1. DOI: (...)
58By expanding the diversity of meanings and strategies around this artistic practice, Robinson challenges the traditional conceptions of the role and means of documenting and filming performances. In this sense, it is helpful to revise yet another point of view on other aspects of performance related to time, immediacy, and vestiges. For Bojana Kunst16,
"performance can be described as a particular temporal rupture, a material implosion of different forces, which is always singular and, in this way, escapes the desire for capture. Its political strength is then closely related to the very specific temporality of the present, which does not get its strength from its disappearing ontology, but rather from the persistent materiality of performance: from the micropolitical rearrangements of different forces. In recent decades, this relationship has mostly been analyzed through different approaches to the ontology of performance (Kunst, B., 2015: 1).
59In Robinson's case, his body operates as a living archive that, through mediation, experience, selection, and experimentation, has internalized or embodied stories of slavery, colonization, identity traits, myths of origin, pain, strenuous work, anguish and self-criticism. Through his performative actions, the artist transmits gestures, sounds, experiences, and memories that he has embodied to communicate his concerns and questions to the audience during his live act and through the filming and documentation of his action.
60For this reason, although in Robinson's work there is a substantial difference between the live performance and the video, both forms manage to break through into the immediate present, create registers, generate deep layers of meaning, and transmit knowledge. Perhaps, this is due to the intense involvement of the artist in both spheres of his work, namely the live-action and the documentation of it, producing a continuum of intention and an aesthetic project that responds to Robinson's artistic subjectivity.
61The various presentations of his performance activate the political potential of his work, as it bursts into space and time to create mediations and reinterpretations of the past and present to stir memories. Robinson's performance and video installation activate memory and memories as places that exorcize the past and the present.
62These actions trigger a time of dissidence and subversive reinterpretations of the past and present. Each movement or repetition in a loop complicates time, and the known histories and national identity issues are confronted. Also, and this is crucial, both the performance and the projection of the video installation renovate the encounter between the artist and the audience. The re-creation or repetition of the performance is never a one-to-one translation of the original material; it is always a critical and self-reflective interpretation that permeates and communicates to the audience.
63Robinson's work presents itself as a compelling case to address the fine line between the definition of performance and the immediacy of the body in a particular time and space, and the resulting documentation of the live-action considered as a different work.
64The potency of Robinson's work lies, on the one hand, in his capacity to imbue his performance with the specificities of human experience, bringing forth his contemporary yet historical concerns, inquiries, and struggles. On the other hand, Robinson's powerful work challenges the "disappearing nature" of performance practices by continuously building and sharing the traces, archives, and documents produced by his performances. Robinson's body becomes a place of remembrance, a space where memory activates itself, a protagonist of the complex archive of our collective history.
65These crucial formal aspects of Robinson's creative process, and the rhizomatic potential of the knowledge that he transmits through his actions, allow us to point out that this artist represents a case study on the history of performance in how Latin American artists are raising relevant socio-political and cultural concerns. With his actions, he expands the theoretical frontiers of artistic practices such as this and other expressive means of contemporary art from the Latin American and Central American region.