PIG PIG PIG attempts a new vocabulary of violence, broaching the unspeakable: absence, solitude, the monstrous, anger, horror and pleasure, the very brutality of being--myths supporting otherness; an oppositional otherness, making language and sex attacks on a falsely tolerant society. Incantatory texts intone a melancholy foreboding of a body no longer idyllic but base merchandise; the body as garbage. To celebrate, and also to make present and understand the other, whether real or imagined, is not primarily an analytic activity, but a mimetic one. It is to speak like the other and at the same time remain oneself; losing each other while taking up the other’s identities, shifting mutably between one self and the other, one sex and the other. ‘This way of finding oneself in the other, this objectification, is always more or less, a form of alienation, at once a loss of oneself and a recovery of oneself,’ writes Umberto Eco in The Open Work. Contrarily, there are means of subjectivation by definition of the other, of that which we are not—‘I know who I am because I am not you.’ We are one being split into two halves, good and bad—approaching an aesthetic of revision, fragmentation, doubling. This corrupted speech intones a new vocabulary of violence. Citation, quotation, pastiche, parody, analogy, repetition, rhyme are a means to dislocate the spectator out of a fictional logic, toward otherness. Language does not represent, it cites. It repeats. It forms analogies, thus effacing identification, or definitions of space or linearity. As the two sole performers, we attempt to erase ourselves within the work in order to approach being ‘other ’, thereby achieving a form of contamination, of perversion of self. Created and performed by Carlos Soto and Charles Chemin. July 2010, Moscow Museum of Modern Art / Qui Vive? Biennial; Année France-Russie 2010; with the support of Point Ephémère-Centre de dynamiques artistiques, Paris.