A man is lying naked on a dance floor smeared with green pigmented oil. Like a hanged horizontally, it is hung by the neck to a 13m long cable and connected at the other end to a winch. Yann Marussich's performance has no specific duration. The winch is accessible to all and can be operated. If it is activated, it rolls up on itself, leading Yann Marussich by the neck in its direction, which then begins its sadistic (public) and masochist (Yann Marussich) crossing.

From the moment the spectator enters the space and whatever he does, he is an entire part of the performance. The public has complete freedom at all levels. There is no indication of what to do next. No role is attributed to him except the responsibility for his own person, for his own opinion and his own actions, and even for his passivity. No censorship either. There are no possibilities.

Without presented instructions given, the audience is confronted with itself and reveals its repressed or conscious desires in the face of an exercise of responsibility such as Stanley Milgram had experienced in Submission to Authority between 1960 and 1963. The audience is deliberately confronted. to a group dynamic, a place invested with hope and threats.

Individuals are linked to each other by three possible relationships: sympathy, antipathy, indifference. It emerges that with a democratically managed group aggressiveness increases productivity. With this high-risk performance, Yann Marussich is voluntarily tying the knot and experimenting with individual freedoms of self-emergence within an audience.

Text: Anne Rochat