Marco Paulo Rolla Reflects on Long-Duration Performance and Pandemic Confinement

Marco Paulo Rolla explores parallels between long-duration performance art and the COVID-19 pandemic's enforced isolation. He examines how both situations involve submission to restrictions, altered perceptions of time, and the body's memory of performative duration. The artist references historical performance movements from Dada to the 1950s-70s, noting how confinement has forced a collective experience of risk and limit similar to artistic practice. Rolla cites Taiwanese artist Tehching Hsieh's 1980-1981 ONE YEAR PERFORMANCE, where he confined himself in a room for a year, photographing himself every hour. The text connects this to contemporary pandemic realities, where individuals confront solitude, self-perception, and the loss of free movement. Rolla argues that discipline and submission, often resisted in Brazil due to militarized historical associations, can enable personal evolution. He suggests the pandemic offers an opportunity to reconnect with one's own sense of time and expand within new limits, much like a performer uses bodily restriction to generate energy and reinvent the present moment.