A work for one performer1, two instrumentalists, objects, electronica and video, which premiered in Monaco in 2021: this is the performative proposal by French-Argentinian contemporary composer Sebastián Rivas. In it, the theatrical and the audiovisual – as procedures – are combined through different folds and traces to give shape to a unique piece with elevated aesthetic impact. The work does not deal with the impossibility of the sexual relation as a tragedy, but rather as an opening towards a possible creation. Where there is no sexual relation, there is invention and artistic production as a possible act of writing the impossible.
In Snow on Her Lips, Sebastián Rivas constructs an artistic experience that functions as an open experimental prototype where voice, sound and image do not complement each other in a closed whole, but rather reveal their own operability. The work does not seek to consummate a narrative or a full meaning; its centre seems to lie in the staging itself – in the possibility of making the artistic action visible in its course – where each element can be recomposed and transformed. Heiner Müller's Ophelia2 inhabits the work, appearing with a glitched face3 immersed in deep darkness, accompanied by an extraterritorial voice reciting fragments, snippets of sound in a staged disarticulation with a body that seems to be struggling to speak. In such discordance, the complex amalgam of representations that this woman's body receives will begin to take shape.
The work offers no concurrence between images and words, nor total communion between the bodily fragments. Sounds, images and silences intersect and evade each other, exposing the constitutive flaw that structures the staging. Impossibility does not appear on the horizon as failure, but rather rises to the very condition of the performative and aesthetic experience embodied by the performer Emma Terno. A body that does not appear from the beginning as a complete organism, but rather as the effect of an absence; Rivas reconstructs a fragmented body: every gesture, every whisper, every silence suggests presence, but simultaneously denies wholeness.
Snow On Her Lips does not propose a conclusive narrative or any promise of harmony; it presents itself as an incomplete and dynamic artistic endeavour that resonates in the body. It transforms emptiness into sensory matter, rhythm and texture, showing how emptiness itself can operate as a creative nucleus. It is not about the restitution of a totality but rather a surface of invention. A body as a singular response, a surface of inscription and possible artifice in the face of structural impossibility that enhances the aesthetic experience.
[1] Rivas, S., Snow on Her Lips, available online: YouTube.
[2] Müller, H., Hamlet/Maschine, 1989/1990. [Editor's note: Hamlet/Maschine is a play loosely based on Shakespeare's Hamlet. In Müller's work, Ophelia delivers a monologue, parts of which are spoken during Snow On Her Lips. The monologue contains the line "snow on her lips."]
[3] Digital distortion technique that mimics faults or malfunctions in images and video reproductions, such as distortions or static noise.
