It ain’t gonna fly, 2021

Artists Wera Bet   Ola Zielińska
Genre Performance   Video
Edition Survival 19
  • performance/video

The insect television broadcasts the live show It Ain’t Gonna Fly, featuring a special guest – Fly Me, known for her famous performance in Yoko Ono’s Fly (1971). In the film, Fly Me performs choreography on the body of actress Virginia Lust. Alexis High, the host of the show, opens a conversation about cleanliness and hygiene as instruments of generating and maintaining power. The interviewees draw on philosophical, sociological and aesthetic concepts that question the legitimacy of the Judeo-Christian dualism associating the corporeal or natural with that which is “wrong” or “primitive” – ​​hence dangerous and in need of control. How can we upend the prevailing social and political order, in which our own unique and special bodies are less and less our own, despite the neoliberal illusion of democratic freedom? What risk to our future functioning as a society is posed by the necessary sanitary regime, which can be instrumentalised by the authorities? What do our bodies become in such circumstances, how do these metamorphoses proceed? The artists evoke the most well-known anti-purist concepts, including those by Mary Douglas, the author of Purity and Danger, Alexis Shotwell, who wrote Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times, as well as Zygmunt Bauman’s theories about the present time. The project is conceived as a series of performative actions modelled after TV talk shows that take place in the world of insects. Its protagonists are always two houseflies: the hostess and an invited guest, different in each episode. The show has its permanent setting and music, including a number of characteristic jingles. The flies conduct conversations while sitting on tongues. The artists explore the form of a talk show – a quasi-journalistic format in which the interlocutors do their best to provide live entertainment to viewers. The public merges with what is allegedly private, while gossip becomes a carrier of knowledge. As the title suggests, it will not turn out well.