Excerpt from the text read at the performance:

" What do you prefer, employment or job stability? "

This is another silent question. In 2008, I posed it in two performances. First, in the performance titled "Performance," which takes place in the reverberations of this question in the mind of someone reading a vinyl on a wall; and then in the performance "Responda," at the performance gathering organized by Guillermo Castrillón that year at the Mochileros Bar.

I won't go into descriptive details. The important thing is that the question appeared clearly on the inside of the blindfold that blocked the view of the seventy people in the audience, and then, as if not to be overlooked, I insisted on the interview I conducted with each person upon leaving.

Perhaps I shouldn't have been surprised by the fact that none of the colleagues summoned to the same meeting attempted any direct response to the question posed to them, as some members of the audience did. It's not that they didn't rehearse conversations with kindness, believing they were responding, but rather that all their responses were either praise or judgment of the performance they had just experienced, elegant (and sometimes not so elegant) evasions of the question itself.

In this country of 70,000 ignored dead, in the midst of a gathering of self-described performance professionals, primarily from dance and theater backgrounds, no one among those expressly invited to confront and question, to reflect on performance, could stammer out a response, or even a follow-up question. Probably because, along with the event's curator, Guillermo Castrillón, they agreed with Tarazona's book in understanding performance as the art of the artist's body exhibiting itself, and since they hadn't seen any of the artist's bodies in the performance, what body were we talking about? In a context in which what counts is the body of one's likeness, present with narcissistic enjoyment, with postmodern perversion, with individualistic success, the disappeared bodies were bodies that didn't count in the cognition, sensitivity, sensoriality, and symbolic systems of those minds to whom I directed my question.

I've been left with a response from someone who dedicates herself to performance—or who thinks she does that and is also prestigious for it—that sticks in my memory. This person told me, very bluntly , "Your question is too conceptual; it makes me dizzy and I don't understand it." Another person, who is not an artist and is a convinced and outspoken Fujimontesinista, replied, rather stiffly, "Your question seems like a tongue twister and means nothing."

With the impressive and standardized coincidence of both reactions, that of the loose-boned performer and that of the stiff-necked Fujimontesinista, I finally got my answer and you have received my comment on what might bring us together in this encounter."