It’s literally a car crash when Paula Garcia performs her art

This year’s Hobart Dark Mofo festival will feature Brazilian artist Paula Garcia performing her unique Crash Body experience live for the first time.

Paula Garcia. Picture: Marco Anelli.

Have you ever been involved in a head-on collision? Have you ever witnessed one? People who survive or even observe head-on crashes often find their lives impacted, forever. Paula Garcia knows well the effects of such an incident: she was involved in one. But it was one she deliberately created, voluntarily taking the wheel for RAW, part of the Brazilian performance artist’s growing body of work. Her response following the moment of impact was both shocking and surprising.

Eight years in the making and at considerable personal expense, both financially and physically, RAW was to debut in Sao Paulo in a gallery filled with spectators in 2020. Unfortunately the one-off show was scheduled on the exact day the Brazilian government announced a pandemic-induced lockdown, and audiences were banned.

The decision was taken for RAW to go ahead without spectators. The show was professionally filmed and live­streamed to the 800-strong audience instead.

Now, five years later and for the first time, the show will be performed before a live audience as one of the headline acts of this year’s Dark Mofo festival in Hobart. A free event, the reworked production Crash Body will take place alongside the Derwent River at nightfall in a show audiences are unlikely to forget.

For Garcia, the chance to recreate the work with real spectators is one she never dreamed would happen.

“I could not believe it when I got the email from (Dark Mofo artistic director Chris Twite). We had a call and he said, ‘Paula, you didn’t have the public, so let’s do it with the public.’ He made my heart explode. This changes everything.”

The name Paula Garcia may not be immediately familiar to Australian audiences, although she has visited before, as part of the 2024 Adelaide Festival. There she was co-curating various works by several international artists including local performance artist Mike Parr, part of the ongoing Takeover series by the ­Marina Abramovic Institute, the organisation Garcia co-founded with her close friend and colleague Abramovic, the world’s most ­renowned performance artist and a woman Garcia says helped change her life.

Born in Sao Paulo, Garcia – an artist, curator and researcher – today works across performance and sound art, although she began life as a professional actor. It was experiencing works by the likes of Abramovic, Yoko Ono, John Cage and Nam June Pai that saw her pivot to an undergraduate and masters degree in visual art, ultimately becoming a performance artist herself, drawn to the idea that the process of creating is often as important and interesting as the art itself.

Regularly using her own body to explore ideas around presence, sound and physical and mental limits, her provocative experimental works challenge traditional exhibition formats. Garcia’s performances have been exhibited in major venues worldwide, from London’s Southbank Centre to Robert Wilson’s Watermill Center in New York.

As a curator, she has had a seminal role in encouraging informed debate around the often-marginalised arena of performance art that grew out of early 20th century anti-art movements such as Dadaism.

Paula Garcia's Crash Body will be performed live for the first time at Dark Mofo.

Garcia first met Abramovic in 2010. A figure well known to and beloved of Australia herself, Abramovic is the so-called godmother of performance art, the Belgrade-born New York-based artist who famously sat silently and unmoving for eight hours a day for 90 days at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 2010 while audiences queued for hours to simply sit and gaze, one-on one, at Abramovic for The Artist is Present. Revered by everyone from Lady Gaga to Bjork, the charismatic performer has had the greatest influence on performance art to date, with her practice having taken her from Australia where she spent a year living with the Pitjantjatjara people, an experience she said changed her life; to the Great Wall of China.

A regular guest of Australian festivals and exhibitions, Abramovic was given a retrospective at Dark Mofo in 2015, the same year she was the subject of Marina Abramovic: In Residence, part of John Kaldor’s Public Art Projects in Sydney. It isn’t a stretch to ­imagine why Garcia, now 50, felt intimidated when introduced to the older, pioneering performance artist in 2010 in Sao Paulo, where the latter had her first gallery show following The Artist is Present.

“The first thing she said to me, jokingly, was, ‘Oh, so you do performance. How are you going to survive?’” recalls Garcia. “Then she said, ‘I want to see your work’ so we sat with my computer and I was sweating, just being next to her and showing my work to her. It was crazy because she closed my computer and said, ‘Your work is very good’. I think she saw in me real process, somebody who was doing something that impacted her. From there it was crazy. She changed my life.”

Review is speaking to Garcia over Zoom from Athens, Greece, where she travels twice a year to the Marina Abramovic Institute, an organisation that explores, supports and presents performance art. Over the course of an hour she proves entertaining, engaged and thoughtful company, her calm demeanour belying the ferocity of much of her art.

Abramovic and Garcia first worked together in 2013 on Terra Comunal for MAI, curated by the pair of them and including a performance by Garcia in Sao Paulo in 2015. Garcia’s work, Corpo ­Ruinado (Crumbling Body), required the artist to be present eight hours a day for two months straight, locked in a magnetised room containing three tonnes of steel objects she progressively hurled or shoved against the walls, where they stuck. The first day left her in hospital bruised and bleeding profusely from a large gash on her arm, with 59 days to go.

“The next morning Marina called and asked was I preparing to go back in. I had pain all over my body but I was and she said, ‘Are you f..king crazy?’ But she was laughing, saying ‘You cannot perform 60 days with this energy. The work is amazing but you have to learn to work with your energy and the energy of the work. Because if you go with this speed and this level, it’s going to die.’

Crash Body, the aftermath, a work by Paula Garcia.

“It was really beautiful because with this in mind I started to learn from the work … to be present, because so often your mind tries to escape.”

It was following her move to New York in 2012 – where Garcia experienced “one of the most difficult years of my life” as she struggled to understand the language and make a living – that she conceived the idea for RAW. Where previously works like Corpo Ruinado and her Noise Body series for MAI – in which she wore magnetised body armour and invited the public to throw metal objects at her – meant she was the passive participant, she was instead drawn to the idea of being in control of her body and actions.

“I was sitting on a bus in New York and I had this vision of me wearing the car, the car being my body armour, and the image of crashing into a metal beam, so instead of having forces coming to me it was me making the decision to throw myself into that, so there was a change of who is in charge.”

Through talking to stunt drivers and undertaking various stunt driving courses in Hollywood herself, RAW ultimately evolved into a head-on crash between two cars, one driven by Garcia and the other by a professional stuntman.

“You might ask why I don’t hire two stunt drivers, it’s because it’s only through this experience you’re going to be able to change and understand so many mental and physical spaces you’ve never been before.

“The experience is everything, the process is everything.”

For the next eight years she relentlessly trained Crossfit, sourced fireproof clothes, neck protection, helmets, custom-made five-point seatbelts and, of course, the cars before choreographing the show, which begins with the pair circling the vehicles and each other before slowly driving the cars and increasing the momentum and speed into skids, revs, braking, speeding, before the ultimate, inevitable head-on crash.

“It’s very violent. The crash itself is terrible,” she says quietly. “Human instinct is not to do a suicidal action.”

Following the crash, Garcia remained in the car, shaking uncontrollably, certain she was badly injured. “I’d never experience a head-on, I thought I was hurt, my whole body was shaking.”

She was in fact unharmed and when she was released she checked on her stunt driver. “He was spitting blood, he’d bitten his tongue. This time he’s wearing a mouthguard,” she adds.

For Dark Mofo the newly choreographed work Crash Body will feature a soundscape mixing an existing soundtrack with live sounds from microphones on Garcia’s body and in her car, one of two second-hand Audi TTs that have been fully stripped internally and fitted to stunt driver specifications (the original owners are travelling to the show, Review understands). A team of specialists and other stunt workers will be on hand ensuring crowd safety. The wrecked cars will ultimately be relocated to the festival hub Dark Park where they’ll ­remain for the duration.

But what of the suggestion a pair of cars colliding is mere spectacle, and not art? Twite won’t bite. He unconsciously reiterates MAI’s raison d’etre: creating art that is in the now, that keeps you present, that explores process and provokes an individual response that is nevertheless experienced as a community.

Crumbling Body, by Paula Garcia.

“Daring performance art has always been a strong part of Dark Mofo, and it’s incredible to be able to present work at this scale,” he says. “It asks audience members to sit inside the tension Paula creates as she moves around the site … everything slowly building to when the cars pass each other, narrowly missing, to the crash, which is the end of the work but not the climax, the climax is the moment of being drawn into that tension … and that is an interesting place Paula is exploring.”

Dark Mofo is no stranger to dangerous and provocative programming, in fact it welcomes it. Who could forget Mike Parr being buried in a steel container underneath one of Hobart’s busiest streets for three days in 2018; or the slaughtering of a bull as part of Austrian artist Hermann Nitsch’s performance 150.Action the year prior? Or Santiago Sierra’s Dark Mofo-commissioned 2021 artwork, Union Flag, in which the Spanish artist proposed to soak the British flag in a bucket of blood donated by First Nations ­people, a commission Dark Mofo later cancelled due to the public outcry.

For Garcia, Crash Body is the latest in her body of work that ­explores concepts of visible and invisible forces, the experience of violent action on the body, uncertainty, risk, the fragility and the strength of the body. She aims to reclaim the body, a “house” she says society variously dismisses or places too many demands on, a body she felt uncertain in as a gay child growing up in conservative Brazil at a time when homosexuality wasn’t discussed and certainly wasn’t an accepted part of popular culture the way it is today. She references a documentary she contributed to in 2016. “I talk about creating a superbody, a resilient body that cannot be dominated by social structures, economic structures, family structures,” she says.

Garcia is excited to be performing Crash Body before a live audience. “What will be the energy, the tension?” she ponders.

Five years on from creating RAW, she is in a different place, physically and emotionally.

“My body is a different body. In five years we all went through the pandemic, which was very difficult, especially in Brazil. I had thyroid cancer in 2020, surgery, it was mild but it changed many things in me. So I feel more vulnerable now. But in other aspects I feel even stronger, because we take our life experience into the work.”

As part of Dark Mofo, Crash Body will be performed on June 7 at the Hobart Regatta Grounds. Free.