The Body is a Cosmic Mass

Gery Georgieva: The Body Is a Cosmic Mass

Dina Akhmadeeva

Among the treasures of the Varna Necropolis – a Copper Age 5th-millennium BC burial site in the vicinity of the city of Varna, Gery Georgieva’s place of birth – are thousands of intricate gold artefacts widely recognised to be Europe’s first jewellery. Among them, a precious few make a set of delicate circular convex gold pendants. Reproduced in black and white inside Marija Gimbutas’s 1991 publication The Civilization of the Goddess, two of them have small openings in the middle. The caption reads, “Round and convex gold pendants ‘with eyes.’ Cemetery of Varna, Bulgaria.” In the book, among her many works on this subject, the archaeologist and anthropologist posited a theory of a Neolithic and Bronze Age “Old Europe” set up as a matriarchal culture of earth goddess-worship. Two open eyes pierce through the image, imagined having been placed over the eyes of the dead, watchfully staying open across the millennia. Gimbutas’s theory of a prehistoric matriarchal “Old Europe” has since been complicated, not least by those very finds at Varna that have been studied since, but to linger with her 1960s and 1970s feminist vision of mother goddesses from prehistory is to open out onto some of the central concerns of Gery Georgieva’s practice: a matrix of archetypes and their undoing or freeing; gender in a nexus of structures of power; working from and through the body; an insistence on deeper structures of time as lineages for her performance-based practice rooted in belief, customs and myth. In the unclosing gold eyes of the Varna Necropolis, I imagine the figure of the female seer Sibyl, subject of Georgieva’s Bulgarian Pavilion work UWU Channel Radiance (Sybil’s Noon Shower of Stones) (2020–2026).
The single-channel video reworked for the pavilion was first shown in the context of Georgieva’s solo exhibition at Cubitt in London. Central to it is the figure of the modern-day Sibyl. One of the prophetic Sibyls, Ancient Greek oracles through whose bodies and “from whose lips the god speaks,” has been reimagined and embodied by Georgieva herself as a newsreader delivering in a clipped tone, and with utter control of emotion, a series of prophesies. “Tonight, we reflect on the discovery that this is all it could be for us,” she says calmly. “The strong will take leave with their lifeblood fully charged carrying nothing but their maternal love documents and fair memories.” Here, Georgieva imagines through the embodied experience of performance a channelling, a state of divine knowledge from beyond the body, recast as a figure channelling authority of modern-day power structures of mediaspheres and state ideologies.
Yet what Georgieva’s Sibyl utters is an algorithmic descent into poetry. The work’s origin point is a script collaboration with writer and poet Vanessa Onwuemezi for the original presentation in London. It is a process for which Georgieva and Onwuemezi used an algorithm to comb through 40 years of language contained within Cubitt’s archives, the work’s original site of presentation. Once the technology of the algorithm reached its limit, the artist and writer took the generated verbal material, stretched the algorithm’s logic further, and used it as the basis to “generate” the Sibyl’s oblique and poetic utterances. UWU Channel Radiance (Sybil’s Noon Shower of Stones) is one of Georgieva’s first works relying more heavily on spoken word, having previously emphasised movement or choreographic elements. Yet there is a parity between word and gesture that she has come to identify: “I see words also as found objects in a way that I might see choreography or a routine as a found object that I would recontextualize and use.” In this freeing up of language of its origin and using it as reconstituted material, Georgieva’s practice nods to a lineage of generative poetry, in a stream that connects back to Fluxus, the absurdity of Dada, and the exquisite corpses of Surrealism, the reconstituted verbal or visual body of a collective psyche.
This reconstitution of the body – or, rather, the reconstitution of the being inhabiting that body against societal expectations or constraints – is central to Georgieva’s performance-based works, as well as in the context of her own relationship to performance as her medium. Flanking the central footage of the newsroom Sibyl in UWU Channel Radiance (Sybil’s Noon Shower of Stones) are moving images that include: choreographed movements by Georgieva at the site of a cave; a close-up of an idealized female body in the form of a fountain sculpture; dancing young women in the setting of a club in Varna that Georgieva used to frequent as a teenager. Such archetypes – some of which point to normative societal expectations of femininity, while others draw attention to a spectrum of immanent and transcendent qualities, from divine wisdom to mystical power – multiply across the breadth of Georgieva’s practice as her avatars. Alongside the Sibyl, she is: Vera Modena, the pop star who speaks only in Bulgarian and wears “traditional” Bulgarian dress, whom Georgieva both killed off and resurrected; the Diva, an embodiment of celebrity worship; the Rose Queen, a “centrepiece” and cultural symbol of Bulgaria’s national celebrations during the annual Rose Festival; Venus, who has an out-of-body experience and observes herself as a marble statue during Georgieva’s performances. Georgieva’s Venus inaugurates the opening of the Bulgarian Pavilion in Venice, and her words within Georgieva’s script embrace the freeing possibilities of changing states: Your body is now a bag
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Wavering
as you dissolve
Into gel
Not just plasma
But
Soup
You eat it.
And now you are soup!
A hot rich protein filled soup.
Cosmic Vomit.
Welcome to your new horizons
Never have you felt so lithe and bubbling.
Never have you felt such joy

If the reconstituted body or the possibilities of a reconstituted identity exist as a freeing of oneself against the grain of archetypes and stereotypes (which are tightly interwound within Georgieva’s understanding), then the plurality of those archetypes that Georgieva takes on and off when she inhabits them performatively could be seen as ways for her to work through and near exhaust those societal tropes. Georgieva has spoken about archetypes as the idea of “a collective subconscious that pre-exists to you and that there’s nothing you can do about it. And a part of me says, ‘maybe we can try.’” The cyclical acting out of those archetypes as characters for Georgieva’s performances might, then, function as an artistic strategy of “repetition compulsion,” in psychoanalytic terms, as a return to those dysfunctional societal patterns of gender and power structures– to gain mastery over them and exhaust them to a (possible or impossible) point of closure.
Those figures of Georgieva’s works point to deeper lineages of customs and systems of belief, collective practices, and forms of knowledge passed down from generation to generation communally as much as their near-kitsch absurdist forms speak from a space of media landscapes of the present day and the scrambling of traditions, whether from within as living and changing phenomena or from without for the mobilization of national agendas. Georgieva’s Bulgarian Pavilion UWU Channel Radiance (Sybil’s Noon Shower of Stones) brings with it modern-day takes on fortune-telling, while earlier works such as her Balkan Idol (2015) and Rodopska Beyonce (Autoethnography II) (2013) have entangled contemporary pop culture references – gestures, choreography, settings – with Bulgarian folk elements in the form of songs and forms of traditional attire for the Rhodope region. In this cross-contamination of traditional and pop cultural forms, there is also an insistence on the co-presence of these elements within the sphere of contemporary performance, as in life. With this, Georgieva is in a line of contemporary practitioners stretching the genealogies of performance to the collective song of the matriarchs and to the choreographic gestures of village gatherings.
These resurfacings, recursions and returns to a deeper time that co-exists with or within the contemporary forms cycles and loops as a temporal structure of Georgieva’s world. The prehistoric earth mother goddess of Old Europe is not prehistoric at all, since there is no linear before or after. The body is a cosmic mass with orbiting moons of lipids. Georgieva’s Sibyl is with us, and among her uttered visions, she speaks of “two naked eyes [that] will peer forth from inside a massive clamshell at the crossroads.” Two eyes have peered forth from the Necropolis at Varna for the past 6,000 years.