Video and sound 8:25:07 Dimensions variable 2014/15
Rafaela Pandolfini's private performance 02 - 02 a dance for every day of my pregnancy (2014-15) and resulting video tracked the nine-month gestation of pregnancy through a ritualised, repetitive dance. Pandolfini danced nightly in her living room or bedroom after Rozsa, her eldest child, was asleep. Pandolfini's performance stemmed from a verbal commitment to her partner. There was no formal contract or manifesto, but a private promise. Through the process of creating 02 - 02 a dance for every day of my pregnancy the record was incidental; Pandolfini danced for herself and for a sense of accomplishment that commitment to a task or a project can bring: I loved the whole thing for the movement, the sound and mapping my moods. And for giving me the sense that I had something on...The performance derives from an intensity of labour: a nine-month project, rendered over eight hours of video footage, but despite this epic temporality, there is an un-monumental element to this private performance. 02 - 02 A dance for every day of my pregnancy has close ties to Mierle Laderman Ukeles early private performances of maintenance, specifically the caretaking tasks associated with her small children. 02 - 02 was performed and filmed in the deeply private space of the living room and bedroom, and the documentation often captures her partner as implicit participant crossing in front of the camera, getting into bed whilst Pandolfini dances and grows. The video functions as a self-portrait in transition, Pandolfini's body changes as she dances through the exhaustion of the day, the months, the effort of pregnancy. In 02 - 02 maintaining the task of the dance is also the maintenance of motherhood. We see the body as burden, the task as burden, and the effort in maintaining both. In relation to her second pregnancy, Pandolfini states 'there was a much stronger sense from the greater community that I was dropping off the face of the earth, like having another baby really cemented my commitment to having a family and that meant I wasn't as committed to being an artist.' 02 - 02 existed as both personal ritual and public reclamation, and challenges assumptions of productivity, creativity, artistic value and labour.
Amelia Wallin http://runway.org.au/maintaining-the-manifesto