Cru Encarnação in conversation with Natalie Mariko
Photography by Gil Corujeira and Feyd Angeles.

Listen to the accompanying mix

Natalie Mariko is a poet and a contributing editor of CODE. Her debut collection HATE POEMS was published by the Australian independent publisher, no more poetry, in 2023.

Prometheus gives the gods’ fire to man and his liver is pecked for eternity. Adam and Eve bite into the forbidden fruit and are banished to a desert of shame. Faust makes a deal at the crossroads in exchange for knowledge and hedonism and is damned to hell. Robert Johnson does the same to play the blues better than anyone ever could and dies at 27. What do these stories tell us? What, ultimately, does knowledge win? Scientific learning is an ever-finer razor’s edge, but the manner in which that takes place is far less simple than just sharpening one’s judgement. In ancient Greece, the ill were attended to at asclepieia – healing temples dedicated to the demigod Asklepius – where they slept with venomous snakes while oneiromancers interpreted their dreams for signs Asklepius had visited and healed them. A 19th century university surgeon’s badge of honour was wearing the same blood-soaked surgical outfit for every procedure, which only contributed to an already high death rate for patients; they thought pain was nature’s way of healing the body and so eschewed anaesthetic aether for amputations; and any suggestion they wash themselves or relieve pain was derided. The notion that learning, scientific or otherwise, is a terminus arrived at smoothly is far from true—and more political a process than we’d like to admit.

Lisbon-born, Berlin-based performance artist Cru Encarnação’s work deliberately dangles on the edge between superstition and science. By incorporating elements as seemingly diametric as illusionism and chemistry, automation and biopolitics or – recently as a part of his work with Odete in The Cursed Assembly – Y2K apocalypse anxiety and The Da Vinci Code, his work attempts to radically undermine the illusion of control. Cru’s performances are characterised by an unwieldy sense of estrangement—from the purpose of everyday objects, from form and intention and even from ‘performance’ itself. His work has something promethean about it, in the sense that it flirts with a grotesque taboo that makes it feel, as an observer, that something about what I’m seeing is forbidden. Or that the whole notion of buying a drink and standing in a gallery to watch a show has been transported into the alchemical laboratory experiments of a long-forgotten nightmare. His use of lip-synced sound and chemical reactions fill the air with a sense that the very act of performance is itself undergoing an experiment, a surgery ripping open epistemological certainties and revealing a long lineage of paranoia. His performances are like software updates on the Theatre of Cruelty, or Situationist ‘happenings’ only you’re in a cave inside Tron on LSD. I spoke with him – through the I’m-right-in-front-of-you artifice of Zoom – about magic tricks, Frankenstein, Tesla, conspiracy theories and how we create and historically situate knowledge.


Natalie Mariko: When you think of the dichotomy between microcosm and macrocosm, where do you immediately go in your mind?

Cru Encarnação: My mind goes directly to alchemical studies. The body as microcosm and the world as macrocosm. Anything related to the body, the flesh and how that reflects the universe.

NM: We experience our body and then we project that out into the world? Or the world is a reflection of how we perceive ourselves within it?

CE: It’s both. Throughout history you can observe processes leaning into one or the other, but it’s always been a mix of both.

NM: A lot of your work has a thru-line of estrangement. The first performance I saw of yours was the EmoBot. The raw elements of that seem fundamental; which is to say a separation between body and mechanics, voice and automation, between autonomy and programming. And I think the spontaneous reaction you just had is related—that we’re being duped by our experiences of the world. You’re being tricked and now let me show you the trick.

CE: If I go back to the EmoBot and the first time I performed it in 2019 and then look at it now, there was always something I was trying to express and can only recently articulate. It connects to the history of illusionism, for example, or a certain history of lies and illusion. Or this delusion of what physical and cognitive reality is and how that influences social and political structures of collective meaning-making. Ultimately, how we’re being tricked by our own perception. I like to explore the uncanny moment where a person’s cognition is questioned. It’s a moment of semantic nihilism—or nihilism about everything. It’s apparent in illusionism or in YouTube videos of chemical reactions where materials react in ways you’re not expecting and bleed past the border into what you might call ‘magic’. It’s a moment of destruction—the destruction of meaning. But what I would like to build from that isn’t only destruction, but a point of re-articulation and the creation of new meanings. My first motivation is the marginalisation of certain bodies and the attempt to intervene here by exploring new ways of creating meaning. A cognitive intervention—not just from the standpoint of theory, books and texts. Illusion or trickery or estrangement is first an estrangement from the microcosm of a certain audience but also, in the remaking of meaning, always returns to the microcosm of an unexpectedly present or different body.


NM: That makes me think about the macrocosmic/microcosmic dichotomy of the body-politic and the biological body and the way in which the political confines the literal shape of bodies in space. Aside from illusion, you also explore automation and machinery in your work. I think these are interlocking, especially illusion and automaton. There’s a great deal of energetic motion that seems (on purpose) to go nowhere in your texts and performances. It plays into this lie, this projection and this falsity of the body-politic against the body-proper. Which is maybe a good point to bring up Frankenstein. Where is the line for you between trickery, the destruction of norms and the destruction of bodies under the macrocosmic political structure (the body-politic or the political institutions which regulate and restrict individual bodies in movement) in the story of Frankenstein?

CE: You bring up kinesis – the kinetic lie of the automaton – and I feel like something that’s definitely guided my work conceptually and aesthetically is the 19th century and how science (and even science fiction) used to be. It’s a period where electricity itself becomes commercialised. Humanity went from lighting candles to flicking a switch. This naturally has a cognitive and psychological impact on people. And there’s something uncanny about it, as there’s always something uncanny about technological developments. The spirit of the 19th century is also what I might call the golden age of magic performance, or illusionism. Magicians and magic performers like Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin or John Henry Pepper, or even the phenomenon of the Fox sisters, are all active during this period. And it’s also a moment where the line between magic and science was publicly blurred. The automaton itself was one of the objects used in magic performance (interesting how the ‘object’ is a body). It was a limited type of robot that may twist or move, but it would happen mechanically. It wasn’t electrical or electromagnetic. And then we have Frankenstein. I actually only read it as late as 2022, but when I did I felt as if I had already read it in a previous life. It made so much sense for the topics I was trying to explore and the historical time period I was interested in. And also on the level of my own embodiment. I see myself—not only in Victor Frankenstein, but also in the monster (which is used in transsexual discourse, most notoriously by Susan Stryker). It weaved together a lot of important fragments. Your question of its relationship with this dichotomy is complex. I can’t un-see the trends of analysis. The monster’s ‘born’ in the conflict between the expectations of his maker – this thing beyond his control – and what he ultimately becomes. His body is haunted by that expectation. Haunted not only literally because (he’s made of dead people), but also as a product of scientific frustrations, anxieties and solipsistic delusion. It’s characterised by the way in which it’s signified, by a projection onto its body. And then there’s what he consciously decides to become. He reads novels and he thinks it’s history, for example—the fantastic is, for him, reality. It’s a transmasc character. And then he learns the behaviour of ‘man’ and he wants a woman and so his body is this dichotomy you’ve described in-itself.

NM: What sticks out and makes it such a lasting and indelible character is not only the fact that it’s beautifully written, but also that the protagonist of the book is literally a walking collection of reanimated corpses waxing lyrical about what it means to be a man.

CE: Frankenstein is somehow extremely archaic. Victor’s research on galvanism as an animating force is rejected by the scientific community. And it’s important to note this is present in the contemporary scientific discourse as something questionable and extremely grotesque. But in the book it’s portrayed as connected to some obsolete, lost scientific knowledge taken from ancient thinkers considered absurd and delusional. That past is connected to the terrifying and strange future of galvanic knowledge. The temporal line is about philosophy of science itself, but is also trans-historical and so also somehow mystical. You can extrapolate it to the esoteric—what is this energy, what is the source of this power at the margins of scientific thought. I don’t believe in the notion of universal ideas, but I’m interested in how people see natural phenomena (even scientifically explained) as mystical or mysterious.


NM: There’s a great deal of mystical thinking being challenged in the 19th century that makes it ripe for a dovetailing of the scientific and the practice of conjuring (or necromancy, as it is in Frankenstein). You see this in the development of the automaton. Like the Mechanical Turk, an automaton that played chess with Napoleon—we see this primitive robot made 200 years ago astonishing the emperor of France and yet 200 years before that we have the witch trials. In 19th century European society, magic becomes a scientific spectacle. You go to see it performed. And no one exemplifies the confluence of magic, electricity, science and performance better than Nikola Tesla.

CE: I love talking about these things. What you were talking about – the witch trials, the practice of necromancy, conjuring versus magic as entertainment – reflects one important milestone in my work. It’s what I would call the gendering of magic. This is a gendering we can and should be critical of, but the first kind of magic is a disruptive, subversive magic. It’s a magic that is, in fact, knowledge. Forbidden knowledge. It’s a certain system of knowledge practices, truth-producing, rhetoric, etc. And then we have the second, which is not actually changing anything in the world. It’s only emphasising the power of the system which already exists. It emphasises and affirms the power of masculinity. I think it’s an important distinction because – and I don’t know if this is mean – but magic is a bit trendy. It’s narrated as a subversive thing and that that’s good in-itself. But I don’t agree. Magic isn’t only subversive. It’s been disseminated and appropriated and used to reaffirm a hegemonic system. That’s why illusionism and this kind of magic performance helps us understand the history of masculinity itself—not to mention how it’s tied to colonialism. The Mechanical Turk is an example of the orientalised and exoticised body. It’s an appropriative moment. Not to mention the misogyny of remaking magic into performance—women in magic are always assistants sawn in half, or mediums and not magicians.

NM: Your artistic practice, in one sense, is an extension of this affirmation of masculinity as an embodying of the masculine. It exposes the trick of gendered bodies. Do you feel like a man when you do magic?

CE: I do, but I also dislike it. There aren’t so many types of performance you would associate with masculinity.. I mean performance as in this act of being on stage and outgoing and vulnerable, which is associated so often with femininity.

NM: I agree. Men are rarely socially allowed to do something which isn’t entirely functional. And when we look at pictures of Tesla in his lab—they’re spectacular, even flamboyant. But when a man is performing gender, it’s a functional thing, like in sport. Performativity is often seen as: I am trying to convince you that I am something. But what you’re doing is (on purpose) trying to convince us you’re something you’re not—in the case of the EmoBot, playing the robot playing the human saying, “I’m here for you and I’m programmed to feel”. It turns ontology on its head.

CE: It’s an illusion trying to disclose the layers of everything as constructed. I love 19th century mechanics because it’s like a technology that is vulnerable. The mechanisms inside are vulnerable because you can see everything—the sprockets and everything connecting the machine. I like to think of my work as something where the constructed-ness of reality becomes so obvious that it makes you question what you took for granted. This creates its own layer of illusion—I can see that it’s constructed, but where does it end? Likewise, illusionism and magic performance are based on optics. And to think about performance itself – in the same way I feel magic performance is interesting – there’s a vector from painting to collage to sculpture, which develops into the environment or installation, which becomes the happening and then into the performance. I always wonder where this more sensorial dimension of performance is. The things behind or beyond performance, in symbols and concepts—material can tell so much more than either. Which is why magic for me, like light for Tesla, is a technical inspiration. It grounds concepts back into material. And, what’s more, magic performance hasn’t even ever been put in the box of performance arts. It’s aesthetically ambiguous. It’s ugly. It’s weird and problematic. But as a performative technique, it can give a lot to performance arts. What Tesla did in his lectures is similar, but, applied to a context in which knowledge and truth are being produced, it’s insane. We’re not just talking about going to a theatre and seeing someone who’s entertaining you and making you feel doubt for a few seconds. He’s showing you; he’s producing the truth, the performance of matter. And the presence of light – not only as something tied to illusion, but also out of political and social necessity, as well as metaphysical curiosity – becomes effective in the way it’s used in these more ‘performative’ lectures. He doesn’t seek for something marketable in the way he sees light and this energy source. It’s like he’s doing science fiction. And it’s driven by this beautiful and touching ambition of bringing light to the world.


NM: There’s something overwhelming in the spectacle of the Tesla coil. In one image you’ve shared with me, he’s sitting calmly in his lab as bolts of lightning fire around him. And then here he’s holding a giant bulb, as if to say, “I’ve got ideas”. And then there’s a drawing of him performing in his laboratory. And then the Wardenclyffe Tower in Long Island, which ran out of funding—a metaphor for ambition undercut by the practicalities of economics. And then here’s the Tesla coil as a child’s plaything—you can buy it for like 5 bucks, touch it and your hair stands on end. Context changes potential, affects how material means. Performance art is also contextual. Images (especially with Instagram and the way we now consume art) can be contextually divorced, but I have to see a performance in reality to really intentionally experience it—especially if it’s a durational performance. How, if at all, do you experience your own practice of performance art as a contextualised, spatial or commercial project?

CE: I’ll quote my friend, Josefina. She’s involved in performance and choreography. She said, when you go to a performance now, the composition is primarily influenced by the fact that it’ll be filmed or live-streamed. It’s based on fixed images that’ll look good on Instagram. And she was saying there’s something about bodily movements, the presence in the moment, that’s lost through that. I think it’s a real issue, but it’s important to break this dichotomy. The question of commercialism means it’s necessary and important to play with the superficiality of a performance’s visual dimension. It’s something moving, something you have to experience, but there’s also something about it that can be enjoyed in the same way you enjoy a painting or a sculpture. I try to see my own work as an essay, something beyond the visual surface of stagecraft or special effects. The macrocosm of materials which inform performance or theatre are deeply decentralised and fragmented and come from a certain spontaneity. And the art world has sought more and more to sediment it into a microcosm of the gallery or (even smaller) the meaning of art itself. For me, it’s important to remember why performance came to be, its genesis in the history of political organisation. The first political assemblies were also amphitheatres. There’s a natural duality of purpose. I perform a lot in galleries, but I feel like my comfort zone is in clubs. That’s where I was most welcomed in the beginning. And I don’t want to stop performing in spaces like that.

NM: Your practice does well at breaking down this barrier and showing the line between the aesthetical and the more philosophically inclined artistic thought. It’s easy to exist along that line ironically, but I think the manner in which you use aesthetical characteristics for your performances are embedded in a distinct and visibly queer underground. It has all of these distinct yet interconnected lineages repurposed into showing the constructed nature of reality itself as a performance. I don’t think there’s anything very different between ‘Come to my lab and I’ll shock the shit out of everything’ and ‘Come to the bar and I’ll be the robot in the corner for 6 hours’. It has the paranoiac dislocation of conspiracy.


CE: If you search Nikola Tesla’s name on YouTube, you find all these sensationalist, Ancient Aliens-type videos. Why? Conspiracy theories lead us to more difficult topics—fear and anxiety can be weaponised to create certain narratives without any foundation. Why is there so much mystery around Tesla? What did he embody and what did he do which couldn’t even be acknowledged? Conspiracy can be problematic and I don’t believe many of these theories, but I have fun in finding the glitch point of where they start because it’s often not completely absurd or delusional. This starting point, like the performative moment of illusion, is capable of completely changing what you thought were the physical properties of space or the reality in front of you. That factual glitch is capable of suddenly creating a whole other world. Momentarily returning to gender. I was reading about paranoia and conspiracy and the author was talking about paranoia as something embodied and connected to femininity—a state of absolute questioning and complete despair. Conspiracy, on the other hand, is a questioning of that same reality, but more as an act of theory-making or story-building. It’s ridiculous and I don’t agree, but I think it does reflect the contemporary phenomena of conspiracy on the internet as it’s tied to (pathetic, inept, powerless) masculinity. All of the videos from the screenshots I sent you are of men trying to explain the hidden meaning of Tesla’s theories.

NM: I’m wondering how you – specifically as it relates to conspiracy and conspiratorial thinking – conduct research for your performances. The topics you deal with and what you integrate into your performances are deliberate but also estranged from what I might call the normative current, even within trans discourse and trans art. I find it very deviant.

CE: A concept I developed from my own practice is something I call the dissociative modus operandi, which is basically an interdisciplinary mode of working driven by the need to take things from one seemingly fixed context and decontextualising them in another. I try to take material – chemical, physical reactions; scientific theories or formulas; theorems or graphic elements – and place it in a context where they cannot mean what their real purpose was. They have to mean something else or otherwise extract something more physical and completely disassociated from, say, scientific context. Or the opposite. For example, taking certain philosophical concepts which I find interesting or worth talking about and projecting them onto scientific objects or material things. Conspiracy itself is this act of dissociation. It disorganises how truth is transmitted. That’s how I see interdisciplinary work. It starts with music and the associations it brings. And then obscure things from the history of science or lost knowledge. And often you have to find your own- formulations because you can’t know, actually, there’s not enough information. You can only speculate. And then you create these worlds, dissociated from reality and not fully connected with the facts. That puts the senses to the forefront. It conspires against the expected structures in which these senses are supposed to operate.

Find more articles like this in Issue 03.