Performer – Anastasia Freygang

Too Sensitive, is an experimental idea for a performance with a dress full of pins painted in flesh tones to match that of the dress and performer. I intended the pins to represent goose bumps, which involuntarily develop when a person is cold or experiencing strong emotions such as fear, euphoria or arousal. The sharp points of the pins in the dress face inwards. I asked the performer to shake them out as though ridding herself of anxiety, and something curious revealed itself in this process. In the instance when the dress was full of pins it did not hurt the performer, as the sharpness of the points was displaced by the mass distribution of the pins. It only caused discomfort when many of the pins had fallen out and only a few remained. This led me to consider the relative functions of the many and the one, the individual and the collective, and the ways in which there is a potential destructiveness or constructiveness between these two, depending on the nature of the relationship between them.

“I am affected not just by this one other, but by a world in which humans, institutions, and organic and inorganic processes all impress themselves upon this me who is at the outset, susceptible in ways that are radically involuntary. The condition of the possibility of my exploitation presupposes that I am a being in need of support, dependent, given over to an infrastructural world in order to act, requiring an emotional infrastructure to survive.” (J. Butler,2015)