Action: The audience encounters the artist wearing a full body suit that delineates its muscle anatomy and holding a metallic bucket in each hand, one filled with water and one containing packages of red clay. Whilst slowly walking for a duration of 20 minutes amongst the art fair’s booths, the artist finally reaches an empty space and suddenly drops both buckets onto the floor, in order to initiate the performance’s following action. Using a pair of scissors, the artist reveals each rectangular piece of red clay by cutting through its package, and places a number of clay pieces on each muscle group, in between his skin and suit. Reaching for the audience’s assistance in unzipping the suit, he initially concentrates onto 'building' his quadriceps by molding the clay with water into an expanded version of this muscle group. For a duration of 4 hours, he completes both quadriceps, and continues this process onto his abdominal area, on both biceps and then each chest muscle, facing an increasing difficulty of balancing all expanded muscle groups together. In between intervals of action, the artist lays on the floor or stands up still in order to allow for the audience’s observation of the body’s expanded anatomy. Once this 'bodybuilding' process has been completed, the artist attempts to unzip the suit himself, whilst balancing the clay parts that fall through the elastic suit or remain attached to his body. Finally, the body suit drops completely onto the floor, the artist walks naked through audience members and exits the fair.

Dale a tu cuerpo (Training for performance #10)

Long-durational performance / Part of event "SWAB Performance" curated by Carolina Diez-Cascon for international art fair "SWAB"/ Pavellon Italiano / Barcelona - ES / October - 2016 / Duration: 240'

Material: artist's body, muscle body suit, red clay, scissors, water, 2 metallic buckets

Photo: Marc Medina