Waerea’s mobile gestures in the public sphere might never gain or retain legitimacy. We cannot answer with any exactitude how they might return to the cultural archive. In a similar way, the ephemeral nature of performance art has often posed a similar dilemma to the disciplinary strictures of art and its collection as archive.

I argue that this mobile and peripatetic performance work creates tensions of global relevance to do with the rights of indigenous groups and the role of art practice in the not-so-classifiable arena of the public social sphere. I will resurrect some slightly forgotten theories of Australian academic Michael Carter, and his exploration of the codes of ‘public’ and ‘private’ circulation (public-public, public-private, private-public and private-private). For Carter, the Victorian male’s mobile circulation through and across cultural boundaries of the home, club, office and brothel, lent him itinerant power. Accordingly, a question of the power of performance (as performative action and utterance) is foremost as I critically engage with Layne Waerea as itinerant female-Mãori-artist-activist (of sorts).

These performances punctuated the Performing Mobilities ASSEMBLY symposium by live video feed. This relay between live performance and live video projection introduces another public audience, who witness both the solitude of the performing figure as if ‘from above’ and a dramatised close-up experience of the performer’s face as it slowly turns from side to side. Through this close-up cinematic view, the passivity of the face remains intensely active. It is not a simple antithesis of action but, rather, reveals discreet and incremental levels of mobility. As a kind of face-to-face encounter, Repeating Silence endeavours to explore a radical passivity of sensibilities beyond vision, mobility and touch.

Watch the Repeating Silence ASSEMBLY symposium performances online.