MI PI ACE
Sbadigliare Eruttare Starnutare
MI PI ACE
Singhiozzare Lacrimare Sudare
MI PI ACE
Orinare Defecare Peteggiare
MI PI ACE
Sputare
E POI
MI PI ACE
Succhiare Leccare Masticare
MI PI ACE
Ingoiare Russare Respirare
MI PI ACE
Ascoltare Guardare Odorare
MI PI ACE
Toccare
MI PI ACE
tutto quello che nel corpo mio può entrare
E ANCOR PIÚ
MI PI ACE
tutto quello che il mio corpo può cacciare
MI PI ACE
quando dico
voglio andare voglio andare voglio andare
E TE LO DICO SPESSO
ma non so più
se in capo al mondo oppure al CESSO
When Bianca alias Tomaso Binga does a reading of ‘MI PI ACE’ (1983), she savors and extends every word, particularly the repeated word pleasure, the Italian piacere. It is this pleasure, the pleasure to transgress and traverse the boundaries of language as well as bodies that Tomaso Binga’s art has been so exquisitely savoring for the past six decades.
The body breathes, listens, spits, sweats, excretes and swallows in a constant balancing act of incorporation and extraction, assimilation and rejection. Binga acknowledges the body as porous and leaking, its boundaries always fluid and permeable. Never stable, finite or self-contained. As such, the body for Binga is also consequently, always considered a site of address, and thus subjected to all kinds of cultural and social coding. Binga’s commitment in exposing and subverting these codes, these imposing, often gendered and patriarchal constructs of language has always been at the very core of her practice. Since her early anthropomorphic alphabets ‘Scrittura Vivente’ (1976) it is indeed her own body that has become language, replacing existing language and questioning its implicit codes and hierarchies.
“The body is a text: every time we define ourselves, we choose definitions - names - that reduce the ways our bodies can be read.”
Legacy Russell
When recently discussing with her the origins of her ‘Dattilocodici’, ‘Typecodes’, another iconic series of works first exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1978 in the exhibition ‘Materializzazione del linguaggio’ curated by Mirella Bentivoglio, Binga stated that they were born out of error. A simple typo, a glitch, the simple mechanics of a typewriter failing and getting stuck, resulting in typing two graphemes on top of one another. It was in this accidental doubling, this double exposure regarded as error resulting abruptly in illegibility, that Binga found infinite freedom and potential. Not only could this rupture disrupt the patriarchal imperative for coherence and legibility, but it could also, quite suddenly, and through such a simple gesture, cut the semiotic umbilical chord between signifier and signified. Setting signification instantly into a free fall, free to land onto uncharted territories, where categories simply seem to have lost their meaning. The familiar, the indexical and the binary was thus disrupted, opening up a more nuanced and fluid space for language and its codifications.
“Errors, ever unpredictable, surface the unnamable, point toward a wild unknown. To become an error is to surrender to becoming unknown, unrecognisable, unnamed. New names are created to describe errors, capturing them and pinning them down their edges for examination. All this is done in an attempt to keep things up and running; this is the conceit of language, where people assume if they can find a word to describe something, that this is the beginning of controlling it”
Legacy Russell
This welcoming of the error is an innate part of Binga’s poetry and performance practice as well. Her de-semantization of the verbal code seeks to displace language too; words repeat, multiply, invade, evade, slip to where they are not meant to be, crisscrossing over boundaries and destabilizing meaning. There is freedom in this play too, and pleasure, so much pleasure. Bianca always knew there were huge obstacles along the way, ostensible superstructures we still are trying to overcome, overthrow actually. But she also knew that one might as well enjoy knocking these obstacles down along the way; fun and play after all foster the seeds of anarchy and rebellion in a world, particularly a Western one, so consumed with order and coherence. Binga seems to have always been acutely aware that senselessness or even non-sense more than anything else, threatens this very demand for order. Whilst simultaneously being perhaps the most apt or even accurate reflection of the absurdity of reality itself.
“Poetry describes nothing that does not slip toward the unknown”
Georges Bataille
Since error seems to play such an important role in Binga’s work, it might also be pertinent to ask who actually gets to define what is an error? After all, error or deviation can only exist in relation to the assumption that there actually is a norm, a “correct” code. Also, according to whose rules is legibility established in the first place? Throughout the years Binga has incessantly kept questioning these inherited, imposing structures, these paralyzing codes, and rendering them visible, whilst undermining them by embracing the error, the deviation from the norm. She deems erring necessary, indispensable even, almost like a survival strategy. Humanity itself is born out of error, she told me.
After all, doesn’t the resulting momentary chaos that error creates, and the subsequent reconfigurations inevitably emerging from it, become most generative of all? Perhaps it is the ultimate way to disrupt the code and create new ground. Grapheme by grapheme, word by word, sentence by sentence, language starts to slip or even disintegrate, only to become more spectral, prismatic and sensitive in relation to its surrounding realities.
‘the neat lines of division, like so much else in the world of human endeavor, are made to be muddied’
Jack Halberstam
written for the exhibition and catalogue Tomaso Binga ‘Di proprio pugno’ in 2022