In the first segment of this work, the artist perforates the wall with full body energetic movements. She drives the knives into the wall in a linear sequence, in a specific, ergonomically determined rhythm and in an anthropometrically defined spatial arrangement. She then leaves them firmly immersed in the substrate, in a way that preserves the material trace of the act by which they arrived, but also forms a kind of spatially specific installation, which is activated in a very physical way in the next phase of performance. At that stage, the knives change character. From a mere tool with which the artist performs her work, they are transformed into fetish objects, that is, objects to which her libidinal currents are tied in a ritual act.

The knife driven into the wall thus becomes a phallus, which undergoes a kind of personal ritual of the artist, performed in front of the audience. The ritual character of this performative act is reflected in its form and manner of performance, and not in some direct reference to some other specific rituals, which have a historical function and wider social significance. This form is manifested through the anthropologically given categories of ‘kenosis’ and ‘plerosis’, which names and denotes the processes of complete emptying of oneself as an active subject, in the first step, and in the next indulgence in re-filling with energy emitted from the subject of an external source. In that second step, the artist appropriates the phallus and freely manipulates it, for her personal pleasure. In that sense, he has no power over it, but is reduced to a means of extracting maximum enjoyment. It is important to note that these fetish objects, knives, which acquire a phallic character, are always turned towards the artist exclusively with the handle, and, unlike the performance tradition in which the inclusion of knives or other tools for stabbing and cutting emphasizes the vulnerability of the artist’s body. introduced into the danger zone, here it is the one that completely sovereignly controls the situation and those objects, and manipulates them quite safely. It is not her body that proves to be penetrable and exposed to incisions, but the ‘body’ of the wall.

In this performance, there are no indications of self-harm, and the emphasis is not on the coefficient of pain that would potentially be induced by the use of sharp objects, but on the enjoyment achieved by their manipulation, which takes place in two directions. The penetrating end and the blade penetrate the solid surface of the wall, and then the handle causes personal erotic pleasure. Such use of the knife is completely opposed to the dramatic sequence that David Memet develops in the book entitled “Three uses of the knife”, in which he exposes his theatrical vision of dramaturgy, under the strong stamp of patriarchal culture. Namely, in support of his thesis, Memet quotes the early blues and folk singer-songwriter Judy Ledbeter, that is, his verses: “you take a knife to cut bread, so that you have the strength to work; then you use it to shave, to make it look beautiful in front of the one you love; finding her with another, you cut out her lying heart ”, in order to demonstrate the dialectic of the dramaturgical procedure, through three successive uses of a knife as a prop. In the case of this performance, the use of the knife escapes the kind of normatization and subjection to the logic of dramaturgical narrative, as proposed by Memet, in the same way that performance as a performance form distances itself from the theatrical way of thinking.