Eloise Fornieles

2014-2016
Performance

The Perverts are a performance art group who dress as animals. They use and pervert appropriated sound and language to create their own political construct. The fabric of their source material is found in mainstream media, political figureheads, religious rhetoric and a wide range of cultural influences that include pop songs, poets and preachers. This image is of Eric performing at one of their gigs at Toynbee Studios.                                    

2015
Performance

Set within the domestic project space at Amatorska, Eric (who was very dirty after Glastonbury) sat in the bath and handed out his own version of Yogi Tea wisdom. Each saying on the tag had been perverted to fit Eric’s own outlook on life and were read out and distributed to participants.

2014
Performance/ Installation

To the dirt reexamine our relationship with nature, and the gap between what is considered wild and what is considered civilised. During the performance the rabbit dresses as a man, skins dead rabbits, wraps them in paper and puts then in the cement mixer. The rabbit skins are then stuffed with newspaper. The work maps a breakdown of language and environment, using symbols sounds and gestures to investigate what was previously familiar terrain.

2015
Performance/ Installation

Set within the red light district of Amsterdam, I dressed as Death and invited people to talk to me on the phone. In the time I wasn’t talking to participants I practised Yoga.

2015
Performance

This monologue is tragic and comic, in it’s delivery and content. Within the speech the character Tiresias grapples with the relationship between our bodies and inanimate objects, asking what is it that makes an object physically and symbolically dangerous or sexual. S/he reflects on the qualities a knife and a banana, both everyday domestic objects that can be regarded as dangerous.

2011
Performance

‘My Dog’s Name is Cat’, brought performance and technology into the same arena, whilst examining the paradox of the Internet as a highly intimate yet extremely public medium. Dressed as a dog and a cat we sat at opposite ends of a long table, each in front of laptop computers. The performance was based on a constructed dialogue between the two animals that was spoken by the computers in automated voices; one a female voice and the other male. As the performance played out it became clear to the viewer that the dog was pretending to be a cat and the cat a dog. A romantic narrative ensued that was all the more absurd due to it being spoken in automated computerised dialogue. The performance concluded with these simulated online identities being unveiled in exchange for a stab at love: a happy ending all round. However, it also addressed a darker side of social networks and hopefully hinted at the dangers of loneliness, simulated identities and façades of intimacy that are intrinsic to our ever-increasing use of social media.

2011
Performance

A Nativity Play examines the gendered language of insemination and how the picture of egg and sperm drawn in popular as well as scientific accounts of reproductive biology relies on stereotypes central to our cultural definitions of male and female. The play is based on the anthropologist Emily Martin’s paper, the “The Egg and the Sperm: How Science has Constructed a Romance based on Stereotypical Male-Female Roles”.

2010
Performance

Calm Down Dear plays on the idea of election promises while adopting in their place lyrics from popular love songs. It takes its title from David Cameron’s recent riposte to the labour MP Angela Eagles during Prime Minister’s Question Time. The patriarchal rhetoric found amongst politicians was replaced by lyrics from love songs and the two protagonists become embroiled in fight for the audience’s adoration.

2009
Performance

For one hour, I walked on a mechanical treadmill with a dead goat across my shoulders, reminiscent of the young men who walked around the city walls in Rome and Greece as part of their coming-of-age ritual. The sacrificial body of the goat was attached to my body with red cords extending from my mouth and vagina, representing the cycles of life and death running through the body. Devoid of any electrical propulsion, the treadmill was simply powered by the movement of walking. As the body drove the machine, it in turn caused the goat to move as if reanimated, while the shadow cast behind the performance amalgamated the three components into a shape reminiscent of a mythological creature.

2007
Performance/ Installation

Set in two booths reminiscent of Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas, I was seen by two sets of audience members. In front of me was a one-way mirror facing out and onto the gallery space, the audience had a clear view as I sat at a small table with only a telephone for communication. To my side, a decapitated deer carcass hung from the ceiling. Unable to see out, I blindly faced the voyeuristic gaze of both the audience and the anonymous participant looking in at me from the booth next door. Once seated, this individual was invited to pick up the phone and call. I explained that I was conducting a survey of what gives people pleasure and that if they took part, I would obligingly answer any question they chose to ask.

2008
Performance/ Installation

In this 72-hour performance, I explored the twin themes of violence and consumption. In a space strewn with discarded clothes stood a skeleton building over which I presided, guarding an animal carcass. For the duration of the three days I didn’t eat. I lanced the hanging meat with a knife and stuffed it with messages of apology and thanks collected from the audience, in a gesture that combined the protest of the hunger strike with questioning Western body-idealism.

During the performance there were two cameramen, who acted as both witnesses and documentary makers. Circling the space in quasi-military costumes, the cameramen resembled vultures, alluding to the symbiotic yet problematic relationship between photographers and their subjects and further highlighting the manner in which individuals are sacrificed to the power of the image, feeding society’s voracious appetite for visual consumption.

A showreel of live performances and video work.