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Mette Ingvartsen: Manual Focus (2003) / a 4.5 workshop response to performance documentation on vimeo. 27.10.2017, PACT Zollverein, Essen.

Our eyes cannot be trusted, as we watch this pack of strange beings move as one and, with scrupulous timing, rest in seemingly uncomfortable positions. Masks of bald men cover the heads of naked women, becoming inverted humans that set up their own behavioural patterns, much like our primates did in our imagined past. The closeness to our own bodies, the embodiment of our own stranger – or something stranger than that? Is this creature perhaps an embodiment of He Who Must Not Be Named? This play between sometimes allowing the masks to fuse with their bodies, as we succumb to the illusion and other times rejecting it as reason is victorious.