In the solo Olympia Vera Mantero skirts the borders of performance art and dance. Incarnating Eduard Manet’s controversial painting Olympia she reads fragments of L’asphixiante culture by the French artist and theoretician Jean Dubuffet.
“The only description of this piece, given in the original flyer, at the première: Vera Mantero, improvisation, 5 minutes. I think no one in the organisation of Marathon For Dance had any idea of what I was going to do. And I also think that it took more than 5 minutes.
The Marathon For Dance is already a historical event, created in 1993 by several dancers and choreographers who had decided to awake the Country. When they invited me to participate, I enthusiastically said yes and started to think about what I could do to ‘awake’ the people. At that time I was reading Asphyxiating Culture by Jean Dubuffet, and it seemed to me absolutely right to read some parts of this book for that occasion to whomever might be present at the Maria Matos Theatre. ‘But read it how? And won’t it be a bit pretentious, to go there and say I am the one who knows what true culture is, or the best culture? Maybe I should be naked … I must read Dubuffet naked. Glued to the ground in front of a microphone? No, that’s impossible … Doing what then? Naked …?’ This nudity made me think of Manet’s Olympia, which I had just seen at the Musée D’Orsay in Paris, where I was living at the time. ‘What if it was Olympia reading Dubuffet? Oh, no! how dreadful, everybody will be blaming me for sacrilege on painting, etc., etc …?’ I told André Lepecki that I wanted to read Dubuffet naked, but didn’t know how to do it without just reading Dubuffet naked, without even talking to him about the painting. Would you believe what he then said? ‘Oh, Vera, don’t you remember Manet’s Olympia (that we had seen together)? I think you should do something with her.’ (!!!). And that’s what I did.” (Vera Mantero)
Concept and execution: Vera Mantero / Light design: João Paulo Xavier / Text: Jean Dubuffet / Music: Extracts of Cameroon music.