Nerisa Del Carmen Guevara is a Filipino performance artist, and award-winning poet. Nerisa often combines her artwork with performance. Her elegies are constructed as a lyric sequence that is enriched by interactions and immersions around the world.
Nerisa’s works concentrate on various focuses, including religion, violence, life after death, and et cetara. Her Elegy 8: Pacific Ocean and Infinite Gestures: Equinox present the sea and the coast as both a setting and as a symbol.
She continues her series of Elegies and Infinite Gestures for the Biennale Jogja XV Equator#5. This will be the ninth in her series. Elegy 9: Ghost of the Sea (Hantu Laut) plays with an English saying “the elephant in the room,” an idiom of significant issue to everyone –that everyone is aware of, but no one has spoken of. The metaphorical room, the space between silence and the spoken, is elegiac. A space of tensions, the metaphor of the Kauao is tension. Tension is energy of opposing forces. In the space of an elegy, tensions are hauntings that appear and reappear between belief and disbelief.
Nerisa also works on a series of videos entitled Infinite Gestures: Tanggul (Break Water). During the Kelana Residency in Pambusuang, West Sulawesi, Indonesia, she encountered temperament over borders and barriers, inclusion and exclusion. She then decided to explore about these focuses, as both barrier and portal to the Other Side. With a repetitive gesture that can be interpreted as a welcome or a barrier, surrender or resistance, on the controversial 700-meter Tanggul (embankment), the continuing Infinite Gestures: Tanggul breaks action through time and space into four screens.
Inspired by the Azan, a live presence emanating from the performing place, the performer is immediately central by way of performance. Its duration is thousands of years. The performance is personal as it uses the body to communicate. It is a presence that calls its audience. The performance is felt, or known, when live bodies in consent or resistance contribute to its meaning.
Photo source: abtheflame.net
