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The representation of the human body used in perforMANcenas functions as a process of criticism and social signification, a metaphor for American territory that illustrates the capacity of the mind to explain and understand the way in which we visualize our relationship with the environment. Cesar Martinez’s performances end when the participants are invited to “choose their favorite part: North, South, East, or We-eat.” The metaphors he uses create relationships between different fields of explanation; they are a space for negotiation and interchange, placed in the interstices of established discourses. In several perforMANcenas, Martinez uses the figure of the “socio-economic metabolism” as an extension of the biological metabolism; while systems of mechanical production transform raw materials into products and services, bodily systems transform energy into waste. For Cesar Martinez, the metabolism of our body and socio-economic metabolism are united by means of the ingestion of metaphors, which work as food. In this manner, the artistic object becomes a duality of consumable objects—speakable prepositions (eat/speak) in which the concrete and the imaginary have the same sense of consumption. In such a way, consumption constitutes a continually interchanging system of relations, where language and the body participate in the articulation of their differences: on the one hand, physical qualities and concrete relations, and on the other, ideal attributes that point to mental happenings. Thus, perforMANcenas, by using the body as a metaphor, turn it into a stage and a political manifestation that expresses the symbolic reversibility of the social character--where art and life unite, through a double, cultural connotation—the consumption of symbolic goods and the body consumed by capital.
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