This performance was part of Venetian Blind. Venetian Blind was an art project featuring 23 Australian and New Zealand artists. Developed by Public Art Commission at Deakin University and curated by Cameron Bishop and David Cross, this hybrid exhibition/public art event saw six projects commissioned (one per month) over the duration of the European Cultural Centre’s Personal Structures exhibition, in conjunction with the 58th Venice Biennale. More info
In this work a line of mucil was ‘drawn’ onto my back by a snail found in the canal in Venice. I interpreted this line as the top cape of the Sicilian trinacria (resembling the triangulated land formation of Sicily), and had a tattooist mark this onto my back as a permanent mapping and reminder of the existential necessity of free mobility, both for snails (the Lessepsian migration of molluscs to Venice by the creation of the Suez Canal) and humans (my own ancestors, myself, and those who I was in solidarity with in Greece just prior to working with the snail). The work is critical in two ways, firstly in the use of text performed during the initial live drawing in the gallery that directly expresses these concepts, and as an ethical provocation to the antagonist aesthetics of Santiago Sierra.
