Performative video artists, Gabriella Mangano and Silvana Mangano strategically benefit from their relationship as identical twins in their digital video work The Surround (2009). The work is one of a group of digital videos made during a residency in El Bruc, Spain—where the artists interact with the surrounding landscape physically or metaphorically by using intuitive, gestural movements and everyday objects (Warner). Situated in front of the intangible and unfamiliar landscape of the Montserrat Mountain, Spain, Gabriella and Silvana insert themselves into the centre of the landscape with black bentwood chairs beneath their feet. The black and white landscape, inspired by neo-realist cinema, becomes the theatre for the enactment of Gabriella and Silvana’s performance (Barlow). Identically dressed, the artists walk delicately with the chairs as body extensions, like stilts, encircling each other through the dry, arid landscape. Throughout their video, Gabriella and Silvana lead each other; follow each other; are separated from each other; and are joined to each other, as though they are connected by a magnetic force that dictates their movements (Maidment and McInnes). The unusual movements of the artists and the incorporation of a banal object impose an additional layer of intrigue or meaning upon the landscape (Maidment and McInnes). The movements that the artists make within space are in line with the artists’ project of performative drawing, as the bentwood chair and the artists’ actions become the key components for drawing the landscape of El Bruc (Maidment and McInnes).
Gabriella and Silvana’s collaborative and symbiotic relationship depicted in The Surround, as well as their other performative video work, raises critical thinking around performance artist duos of the 1960s and 1970s, particularly Marina Abramović and Ulay Laysiepen (Abramović /Ulay) and the creation of a third (collaborative) figure in their experimental performances (Green 41). The work of Abramović /Ulay depicted the artists performing as one collaborative being, and spoke of themselves as apart of a ‘two-headed body’ (Green 41). Within Abramović /Ulay’s this third existence, consisted of the collaborative body as one when performing. Abramović /Ulay referred to this as “vital energy” (Green 41). This is most successfully executed in Breathing In/ Breathing Out (1977) during which the artists developed an intrinsic collaborative being, whereby they inhaled each other’s exhaled breaths until they both fell unconscious (Green 43). Similarly, the relationship and tension between both Gabriella and Silvana in The Surround echoes the question of a third, invisible actor, within their video performances. Despite the fact that the artists are indistinguishable due to their relationship as identical twins, their presence could be intended to present two halves of the same whole instead of two entirely different identities when performing (Zenger and McMaster 285). Thus, the use of similar actions and simple, matching clothing serves to erase personalities and characters in order to emphasise the movement of one collaborative existence as well as the motion of drawing itself (Weir 105). Therefore, Gabriella and Silvana propose how this third authorial figure and the relationship between object and space might articulate new forms of visual language (Weir 105).
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