Gabriele Provenzano, Boel, VIII Venice International Performance Art Week, Curated by Vestandpage, Palazzo Mora European Cultural Centre, Venice, 2023 / Photo Luca Vianello
It has been a long time since man seems to have lost contact with his deep roots, increasingly subjected to complex contemporary conditioning. Totally inserted into social structures that require him to conform to universally accepted and acceptable norms and values, man has quickly learned to be a social animal, forgetting that he is still an animal.
It is certainly undeniable that our deepest drives still resist under the heavy blankets of social conventions, but they now seem so well disguised that it is necessary that every now and then someone demonstrates that it is possible to encounter our deepest nature again. This sometimes happens, as during Gabriele Provenzano’s powerful performance (Maglie, Le, 1998) held in Venice on the occasion of the 2023 VIII Venice International Performance Art Week.
Gabriele Provenzano, Boel, VIII Venice International Performance Art Week, Curated by Vestandpage, Palazzo Mora European Cultural Centre, Venice, 2023 / Photo Luca Vianello
Characterized by a preponderant relational aesthetic, the “Boel” performance sees the artist in the guise of a primitive dog-figure who, as if representing our common animal root, approaches the public in the desire for his ideal training which is not constraint or submission, but rather the attempt to welcome otherness without any prejudice.
The docile dog-figure, with its sweet and welcoming gestures, subverts the traditional master/subordinate relationship and its dynamics of violence by showing how a “sweet adoption” of one subject by the other is possible. “Boel” is built on an etymological matrix, a reference to the Dutch term which stands for “lover, brother”, which changed over time to bully (in love) and then took on a totally opposite meaning, what we know today as bullying – exemplary definition of abusive behavior, harassment and threats. On the basis of this recessive etymological path, Provenzano chooses to retrace the root before the term, restoring its meaning and value.
Violence as a necessary experience towards entry into communities has been widely analyzed in Bruno Bettelheim’s book “Symbol wounds” (SE editore, Milan 2011), in which analogies are outlined between the violent albeit implicit and hidden rites of passage of contemporary society and the explicit and manifest ones, visibly expressed on the body, typical of primitive societies.
Gabriele Provenzano, Boel, VIII Venice International Performance Art Week, Curated by Vestandpage, Palazzo Mora European Cultural Centre, Venice, 2023 / Photo Luca Vianello
This process of translation captured and perfectly sublimated by Provenzano is proposed again in the performance, reversing its roles and methods: it is no longer man who trains the primitive, but the dog-figure offers man a new non-violent, tender, welcoming approach.
The artist demonstrates how a behavioral reversal, a new recession is functional both to better communication between different social groups and to a healthier contact between our inner instinctive dimension, relating to ancestral desires of which we (probably) are no longer even aware , and the need to be socially inserted, accepted, approved in a subtle and commonly tolerated passive violence.
What Bettheleim theorizes is the use of violence as a tool for modeling a shapeless figure (the initiated adolescent, or our common visceral drive) so that it becomes compliant with the universal collective (the community or our psychological superstructures), and proposes the possibility that this is just one of the tools adopted by man to master his most ancestral instincts, the conflict between these and the role that society asks men to adopt. Bettheleim proposes the dramatization of desire as one of the paths towards the domination of drives, and Provenzano does not shy away from this possibility.
Gabriele Provenzano, Boel, VIII Venice International Performance Art Week, Curated by Vestandpage, Palazzo Mora European Cultural Centre, Venice, 2023 / Photo Luca Vianello
The performance develops in changing dynamics. Confronted a few times with the reticence of some spectators, the dog-figure rebels, becomes biting, suddenly takes on those characteristics that he had repudiated shortly before.
The artist then chooses to apply a physical impediment to those who did not want to give in to his sweet embrace. He holds them back, blocks their hands, tries to tie them to a leash which immediately becomes a visible symbol of coercion. He confronts them with the undeniable, clear image of the constraint to which they are constantly subjected and from which, not even at that moment, they are able to free themselves.
Protagonists of an action whose consequences they cannot foresee, the subjects involved choose to indulge their inclinations: they can abandon themselves to adoption and be guided towards the acceptance of otherness, reuniting with their darkest shames, learning that, Ultimately, there’s nothing wrong. Or resist, try to perpetuate that sense of constraint to which they will immediately be subjected, gangrenous in the repetition of a fossil obstinacy: the refusal of the possibility of acceptance.
Gabriele Provenzano stages a powerful relational metaphor by granting a neutral space, devoid of any social convention but forcing a comparison with man’s best friend and, at the same time, with his greatest enemy: himself.
