VIDEO PERFORMANCE | Valentino Caruso

on performance and video-performance

Performance, as an antidote to comfort—for both the spectator and the artist—tenses the space and keeps the audience on their toes. “The artist is the canvas” becomes manifest, and life dissolves into art, while art shares a moment with life. In contrast to the passivity to which the spirit has been reduced in the face of paintings, sculptures, inert, blank spaces, buildings called museums, or “too young” works, the figure of the present human appears, a wanderer, burdened with stimuli. In times of personal micro-ideologies, lobbyist social presences, and the comfort of “safe spaces,” a work hanging on a wall without the artist present no longer manages to move. Video performance, although mediated by the screen, proposes another form of presence. The value of performance today remains in the position assumed by the artist's body: when life itself becomes a stage, when the body is both medium and message, when the tension between work and spectator becomes inevitable. Since 2024, and following my association with fellow performer, colleague, and co-director of the Rulo Contemporary Art Center, Gina Montti, I began studying this discipline. Although I was reluctant at first—because it is an ephemeral language, a language of the body, enigmatic symbols, and few (or no) apparent analogies, difficult to conceptualize—I decided to expose myself to the unknown. By reading texts, viewing recordings, and witnessing performances in different art spaces, I began to understand the power that lies within the works/essays produced from this practice. Some key works that transformed my perception were the book "Terribando muros" (Breaking Down Walls) (2020) by Marina Abramović; the performance opera "Einstein on the Beach" by Philip Glass, Robert Wilson, and Lucinda Childs; and an event organized at our space in 2024: "Horizonte Performático" (Performance Horizon). Since then, I have been able to experience how performance generates—through the sole force of presence and the body—a tension with the spectator, whether for or against.

Below I present the most important essays

CELU ZEN (2025)

Work developed and conceived together with filmmaker Carlos Ángel Luppi.

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The Library began in 2016 in Amsterdam. When I returned to Argentina in 2021, a man gave me seven boxes of books. Half were useless, and the other half wasn't suitable for what I envisioned as a library. That's how I started: with a box on a bench on the sidewalk. That first box soon began to fill itself. I had to replace it with a larger one, but the practical inconvenience of having to bring it in every time it rained led me to build a table with casters so I could move it easily. That table was placed outside my food business, on the main street of my neighborhood. From that moment on, it was a neighborhood success. Magical things began to happen: during the summers, we would set up shop on Saturdays at the local shopping center; Some neighbors began collaborating by weaving a network of spaces in need of books, and thus more than eight libraries were established in 2023 and 2024. Starting in 2025, we began counting the books donated for children: in July, they already exceeded 800. Currently, two cafes in the neighborhood have their own Moscow Library, where anyone can borrow or exchange books, all donated by neighbors. Someone once told me that the table seemed to be a link between the neighborhood libraries and others scattered throughout the city. A bridge between unused books and a new life. The table is a Cartesian plane—which gains volume depending on the number of books stacked—where not only books flow, but also poems that people leave, motivated by the gesture of others. Encounters also happen. More than once, actually many times, I find groups or duos of people collaborating on the search, uniting spirits in a curious, simple conversation, with that superficial depth that comes from talking about titles, authors, or the search for a specific book. A minimal gesture that—for some reason—always touches something essential.