Staging decadence, and I mean real decadence, not the Instagram bullshit where someone arranges twelve cupcakes in a spiral. It’s gotta have that edge. That nervous making quality where you’re not sure if you’re supposed to laugh or recoil or both at once.
Gombrowicz knew this. The guy was writing about grotesque courts and paralyzed social rituals, all that stiff European formality collapsing under its own absurd weight. Princess Ivona is the mute intruder who doesn’t play the game, and the whole rotten edifice can’t handle even one person refusing to perform. So what do you project onto frosted plexiglass for a play about people eating themselves alive with their own pretensions? You show them eating, literally, in that obscene abundance that tips from pleasure into something uglier, more compulsive.
The lit from within table is the move here. That glow that makes everything look both more lustrous and more artificial, like it’s all been embalmed in its own excess. You’re watching bodies feed and fondle and consume in this backlit aquarium of appetite, and it’s gorgeous, sure, but gorgeous the way a car crash in slow motion is gorgeous. There’s a remove to it, that flatness of projection, so you’re watching desire at a distance, mediated, turned into spectacle. Which is exactly what Gombrowicz was doing with his court: making you watch people perform their hungers instead of actually feeling them.
What kills me about this kind of work is how it makes you complicit. You’re sitting there watching food become pornographic, this orgy of textures and surfaces, and you can’t look away even though, or maybe because, it’s making you a little uncomfortable. That’s the Woolf quote doing its work too: this manufactured intimacy, this sense that we’re all in on something together, the candlelight making masks of faces. The projection gives you that same ceremonial distance while pulling you into the ritual.
And using video for Gombrowicz, for that specific play? That’s understanding that modernity is about mediation, about how we can’t even experience excess directly anymore. We need it filtered, projected, made into an image we can consume from a safe distance. The royals in the play can’t just be, they have to perform being royal until the whole thing becomes a grotesque pantomime. Your orgy on plexiglass does the same thing: makes appetite into spectacle, makes feeding into theater, makes the audience complicit voyeurs at a banquet they can’t taste.
That’s the nerve it hits. Not shock for shock’s sake, but this queasy recognition that all our supposedly authentic experiences are just better-lit versions of the same hollow performance. The decadence isn’t in the food or the bodies or even the setup. It’s in the fact that we need the setup at all.
Video projection for Collected Works‘ projection for Witold Gombrowicz’s Ivona, Princess of Burgundia at Performance Art Institute.