So here’s how it ends: not with a bang but with institutional validation, which is the same as saying it ends with a whimper dressed up in gallery lighting.
Franconia Performance Salon #14. The Museum of Performance + Design. A “joint collaboration,” which is fancy talk for “we got legitimized.” From Michael’s living room with Jordan smashing bricks into the floor to a proper museum space with proper lighting and a proper audience who knows how to properly appreciate experimental performance art. This is what success looks like, apparently. This is the death certificate.
Yeah, the work was good, featuring new work by Alessio Silvestrin, Rebecca Ormiston, Yula Paluy, me, Ryan Tacata, Renu Cappelli, Tonyanna Borkovi, Derek Phillips, and Michael Hunter.
But here’s what nobody wants to admit: the moment you move your dangerous thing into a museum, you’ve already embalmed it. You’ve agreed to let it be studied, catalogued, explained. The mess gets cleaned up. The blood gets wiped away. Everything that made those early nights feel alive, the genuine possibility of failure, the lack of safety nets, the sense that we were all figuring it out together in real time, all of that gets replaced with program notes and proper documentation.
Fourteen salons. Three years. From gear lust and new cameras to museum exhibitions. From raw experiment to completed work. From theft to archive. That’s the trajectory, and it’s the same one every goddamn time: you start something because the existing structures feel dead or uninviting, and if you’re successful enough, you yourself become the new dead structure.
At least we got good photos out of it.
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And that was it. #14. The last one, for me at least. We moved it to the Museum of Performance + Design, which should tell you everything, when you take something that started raw and messy in Michael’s living room and put it in a museum, you’ve already admitted it’s over. You’ve already agreed to taxidermy. The work got archived before it was even finished dying. The complete story of all fourteen nights is there if you want to see how things that start as theft end up as exhibits.
Or go back: Salon #13, when it became ritual instead of risk.