Interview with Israel Aloni about their new work titled PASSING
This interview was conducted by Stefani Stoeva for the Toplocentrala blog and is published here: Toplocentrala Blog
Who do you believe you are and can you say that this internal feeling can be performed in its wholeness?
I don’t believe that I am somebody—or anybody—at all. It feels inaccurate to describe how I sense my existence is affirmed to me. Over the years, I’ve found some consolation in the corporeal.
In my artistic practice I work from the assumption that we, huWOmans (a term I coined to challenge the discriminatory aspects of “human,” in dialogue with post-human thought), do not “have” a body, and yet body is all we are. The body is not something we possess or manipulate—it is the very site of experience. The body experiences itself, creating a flow between the desire to be affirmed and the reassurance of that experience.
As for performing this experience—I believe we are always performing it. I wouldn’t be the first to say that what we perceive as the world is, in some sense, a stage. Personhood, and further, personality, are attempts to perform what we deem necessary in order to live a life.
This is why I find contemporary performance so captivating: it allows us to perform a task as someone who is performing someone who is performing someone performing a task. (A huWOman performing a person, performing an actor, performing an action.) What emerges in the gaps between these layers is a lifelike experience.
In the end, I am not someone, but a body in the continuous attempt to perform life itself.
What path have our identities walked to become political? Is there art that is not political?
I believe identity has always been political. I’d even say identity itself is a political strategy. To “identify” means both to name something and to locate it. It soothes our anxiety about being nameless, or about never being found.
Identity, then, is what occurs when we try to fix a being in space-time so it can be addressed as a political subject. Without that pressure to identify ourselves or others, perhaps we might experience life more as flows and waves, rather than points and lines.
Art, too, is inseparable from politics. Artmaking is always in relation to life—often in tension with it. Where does life end and art begin? When does a life event become an artistic gesture? There are no clear answers. To name something as “art,” just like naming an identity, is to reduce it into a format that can be positioned politically.
So instead of asking whether there is art that is not political, I prefer to ask: how can someone embody the process of becoming art, despite the risk of being locked into a presupposed, politicised role?
Where does the tension lie between being and performing identity, and how do audiences participate in this tension as witnesses?
The tension lies precisely in the difference between “being” and “performing.” There’s a tempting idea that huWOmans are something pure or essential, spoiled by identity. But for me, there is no such thing as “being” without the experience of being. That experience is always subjective, and subjectivity is a kind of subjugation—every subject is shaped by selection, by prioritisation, by power. Where there is life, there is power; where there is power, there are dynamic relations.
In my work, those present in the performance space are not passive spectators but witnesses. They don’t only witness the performers—they also witness themselves witnessing. The performance takes shape in the space between transmission and reception, cared for by both performers and witnesses. Performers, in turn, witness the witnesses, as well as themselves in the act of performing. Witnessing becomes an exchange of vulnerability and power.
For example, in PASSING the performers embody what I call a living exhibition. The piece unfolds as a gallery of potentialities and historisities (or herstorisities, acknowledging the gendered dimensions of history). Each witness curates their own experience from their position in the space. Identity here is not a fixed point, but an ongoing, shared curatorial act.
How do bodies, gestures, and silences communicate truths about identity that words cannot?
I don’t especially resonate with the notion of “truth”—especially the idea of a “true” identity, hidden beneath what we present or perform to the world.
But movement speaks differently than words. It is an earlier medium, carrying layers that predate grammatical language. Often the body utters things we don’t consciously attend to, and those utterances escape naming.
Movement also relates to time differently than truth does. It can create a healthy break in the linearity of an event, opening up multiple temporalities. In this way, movement is truthfully specific—precisely itself—without fixing one objective truth in space. For me, this is where movement opens a field of possibilities for both performer and witness.
If identity is a negotiation between inner experience and external recognition, who ultimately decides what is "real"?
I’m not sure what “real” means in this context. Is it something different—or better, or worse—than the sensed or experienced world? I don’t think reality or identity have much to do with decision.
What we call reality emerges from relations, circumstances, coincidences, and flows—perceived in certain ways at certain moments. But those perceptions aren’t necessarily “real.”
I’m curious about the idea of an objective world—the world without us—as Alan Weisman explored in The World Without Us (2007). I don’t have conclusions, but I’m intrigued by the many layers of self we practice and perform as we attempt to live up to what is expected of us.
In what ways does troubling taboos around female identity differ from disrupting those around male sensuality and sexuality? Tell us about you other piece Boys Just Want To Have Fun. Where do these explorations converge?
This is a key question. Boys Just Want To Have Fun is a project I’ve been dedicated to for the past three years. It’s a durational (eight-hour) performance, staged in empty gallery spaces, that confronts taboos around male sensuality and sexuality.
In both Boys Just Want To Have Fun and PASSING it becomes clear that “man” and “woman” function as political currency, but as lived experiences they have no fixed parameters. No one can fully succeed at embodying the category of “man” or “woman,” because the scales of measurement are inconsistent and ambiguous. To present as a man or a woman always comes with the pressure to be a “good” version of that category. The processes of these works show that the only way to “pass” as man or woman is by failing the test of living an attentive, attuned life.
In the early stages of creating PASSING, we returned to Simone de Beauvoir’s well-known line from The Second Sex(1949): “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” Alongside this, we engaged with Audre Lorde’s Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power (1978). Each performer explored her own associations with womanhood. What we discovered was the paradox: the challenge of trying to perform something that can only ever be affirmed through its own performance.
