Kamikaze Lover (poetry on skin 3)

Moscow was one of the most important stations in Mia Florentine Weiss’s life. Having just recently graduated from high school, the young artist was in the midst of an internship at a German news agency when the Second Chechen War broke out in 1999. She spent that summer in Moscow. It was her first contact with war and with all the concomitant destruction, desolation, and dead bodies. At the same time, the artist began to immerse herself in the literary culture of this land of poets and thinkers and melancholics. A literary émigré, her pilgrimages in Russia took her to Boris Pasternak’s dacha in Peredelkino and to Pushkin’s house in the country’s capital, but it was her confrontation with Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita that began to turn her attention to the stage and to performance. “Kamikaze Lover” is a declaration of love to the city of Moscow. It was here that the artist developed her concept of the “living poem”—her first step towards becoming a conceptual performance artist. The performance thus depends upon masking itself in subtler forms—the artist appears here disguised as a homeless person covered with paper messages as she meanders about Red Square; we see her obstructing pedestrian traffic in the subway, or as a flâneur in the urban city’s shopping centres; and we find her mimetically grieving in a cemetery.