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Boryana Rossa & Oleg Mavromatti: "The Vitruvian Body" (2009), in the Performance Programme.
Video: Anne Quirynen

Boryana Rossa (Bulgaria *1972)

Boryana Rossa is an interdisciplinary artist who works in the fields of performance and visual arts. In 2004, Boryana Rossa and the Russian artist Oleg Mavromatti established Ultrafuturo, an international group of artists engaging with issues of technology and science and their social, political and ethical implications.

Boryana Rossa & Oleg Mavromatti: "The Vitruvian Body" (2009), in the Performance Programme.
Photograph: Jan Stradtmann

"The Last Valve (2004) is a multi-layered work at the intersection of technology, ethics and human/machine identity. In the 'The Last Valve' I stitch up my vulva with surgical thread. This symbolic gesture illustrates the Ultrafuturo Manifesto, which calls for humanity to overcome and abolish issues of gender. The performance is also dedicated to the future emergence of a new class of biological and cyborgian beings artificially created in bio-engineering labs. For them, gender will not be a foundation for contradictions, because these entities are most often not gender-specific. This ‘revolution of the species’ is already changing our notion of sex and gender. Inspirational for me were the existence of transgendered models of sexuality and also trans-bodies in the human/animal world as well as the emerging artificial manufacture of ‘intelligent’ robotic, biological and cyborgian entities that don’t have a sexual determination.

'The Last Valve' is also the name of an article written by Lenin in 1905 about Pyotr Stolypin’s agrarian reform. As the prime minister of Russia, Stolypin passed a populist reform to ease social tension prior to the Bolshevik Revolution. Steam generators need valves so they don’t blow up. If one closes the ‘last valve,’ the generator explodes. Stolypin’s reform postponed the Revolution, but not for long. In my performance, I symbolically close the ‘last valve’ that stands in the way of the ‘The Great Genderless Revolution of the Species’ or the time when gender problems will cease to exist." (Boryana Rossa)

The Vitruvian Body
Performance by Boryana Rossa (BG) and Oleg Mavromatti (RUS)

This performance is a reflection to the famous Vitruvian Man – an attempt of the ancient architect Vitruvius to understand the relationship between the "ideal" human proportions and the universal harmony and according to some "the relationship between the material and the spiritual." The performance is a metaphorical action that roots from other works I made and reflects the eternal human desire to create "the ideal" body. Historically body perfection is a controvercial concept, which development can be currently observed in biotechnology. Perfection requirements are painful to bodies that "fail to fit."

Boryana Rossa: "The Last Valve - The Revolution of Species" (2004) in the exhibition.
Photograph: Andreas Süß