Index – Generator, Performance, 2004

 

 

 

Marcello Mercado

Index – Generator

24´color stereo

Performance

2004

 

In this performative intervention, the artist read at a table located within the exposed foundations of the former Kölnischer Kunstverein—a void left by the demolition of a space once dedicated to critical art practices. The table, possibly a remnant of the original structure or a utilitarian element used by workers, was situated several meters below street level, turning the act of reading into a descent, both literal and symbolic. Above, passersby and demonstrators from a nearby leftist political rally moved through the plaza. Directly across from the site stood a real estate agency named “Engels,” casting an ironic shadow across the event.

The performance consisted of reading aloud the index of Karl Marx’s Capital (Volume I), while simultaneously translating it into an invented language known only to the performer. This act of partial transcription and semantic displacement exposed the limits of translation—not as failure, but as a generative space of linguistic breakdown and reconfiguration.

By selecting the index—a structural apparatus rather than the narrative body of the text—the artist activated a typology of knowledge divorced from its explanatory function. Spoken in a language outside recognition, the index became an incantatory scaffold, converting reference into rhythm, order into opacity, sense into sound.

Index – Generator stages a moment of linguistic and spatial estrangement. It repositions the performer’s body as an indexical tool within an ideological and architectural void. As Amelia Jones, Bojana Kunst, and other theorists of performance have argued, the live body is never neutral: it is always situated in time, power, and history. Here, the body becomes a transmitter of unreadable information—a performative grammar of delay, noise, and loss.

The work raises a fundamental question: not only “to whom does the world belong?”—as Brecht once posed—but also, who can speak the language of systems? And what does it mean to respond in a voice no one can decode?