Given her background in performance, Alegr\u00eda Gobeil develops their work through protocols and actions that flirt with self-destructive or dangerous practices. Although some of their gestures can be compared with canonical body-art works\u200a\u2014\u200athose of Gina Pane, Ron Athey, or Franko B, for instance\u200a\u2014\u200aa closer examination reveals that Gobeil\u2019s objectives are significantly different. For this artist, wounds are not intended to prove a strong conviction or be a calculated self-sacrifice for <\/em>art. Cutting is not a metaphor, any more than it asserts the artist\u2019s glorious sovereignty over their own body. Rather, Gobeil performs their wounds in solitary, far from other people\u2019s eyes and their inevitable reprimands.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Writings\u200a\u2014\u200aread, traced, copied, composed, pronounced, photocopied, appropriated, memorized\u200a\u2014\u200aassume a central role in Gobeil\u2019s approach. Gobeil establishes sustained and repeated dialogues with authors of fiction, poetry, or essays who address the experience of psychiatrization. For more than a year, Ingeborg Bachmann\u2019s novel Malina<\/em> was the terrain of a complex negotiation among the lives of the novel\u2019s character, its author, and the artist. By embodying other people\u2019s experiences, ideas, and words, Gobeil expands their body, opens up their flesh and mind, to contaminate their own memories.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, for Gobeil, pain is not so much the expression of control as the locus of a potential solidarity. The neoliberal biopolitics of the body diagnoses, isolates, monitors, and medicalizes. It aims to have the sick quickly return to productivity. Gobeil, on the contrary, resists these forces of individualization by dwelling on the collective possibilities of psychiatrized practices. Welcoming the acts and words of others into their daily life, even into their body, led Gobeil to underline the intrinsically shared nature of these words and acts. Whereas dominant discourses frame psychological pathologies as personal failures, Gobeil\u2019s work shows, rather, that our comprehension of normalcy, health, and ethics is corrupted by the forces of patriarchy, heteronormativity, cisgenderism, classism, capitalism, and more. In this context, is this vaunted sovereignty of the body possible, attainable, or even desirable?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Translated from the French by K\u00e4the Roth<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

\n

<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

\n

<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

\n

\n