Mette’s Pharmacy

Abstract

With the global outbreak of COVID-19, contagion returns to stage in a way not seen since the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) pandemic. As the states have gradually shifted from social distancing to vaccine and herd immunity, it seems opportune to draw from Italian philosopher Roberto Esposito to understand the protective responses to contagions. Esposito’s oeuvre probes into the relationship between sovereignty and biopolitics through the paradigm of immunity, which he maintains is a modern invention designed to protect public life. To extend Esposito’s thinking to today, what seems novel is a hyper-accelerated virtualization of communication and subsuming the public into private. However, the technological medium that absorbs public and private life is all too familiar: We are consenting to incorporate the optimized structures of intimacy over distance, originally instigated by pornography. To explore in choreographic terms this virtualizing tendency of bodies as an immunitary response, I look at Danish choreographer Mette Ingvartsen’s performances 69 Positions, 7 Pleasures, 21 Pornographies and to come (extended), collectively known as The Red Pieces Series (2014-2017). In hindsight, the series stands as a premonitory investigation into bodies and intimate encounters across real and virtual spaces. The performances are expressly about the relationship between the public sphere and sexuality. What makes these works a performative take on biopolitics is their examination of the definitions of public, how a public manages the multiplicity of desires and motions and with what it protects or how it breaches individual bodily boundaries. In the arc of the series, Ingvartsen hijacks the technology inherent in pornography, the excitation-frustration cycles of which became morbidly profitable after HIV as Paul B. Preciado exposed (2013). The Red Pieces Series eventually interrogates community through what Esposito would call an ‘affirmative biopolitics’, the potentiality of bodies remaining open to contaminating relations of difference in shared spaces.