Damiano Bertoli: Continuous Moment – Sordid’s Hotel

Continuous Moment: Sordid’s Hotel is the third instalment of Melbourne-based artist Damiano Bertoli’s research into two interpretations of Pablo Picasso’s play Le Désir Attrapé par la Queue (Desire Captured by the Tail): a 1944 reading in Picasso’s studio featuring members of the Parisian intellectual scene; and a 1967 production organised by French artist Jean-Jacques Lebel in Saint Tropez. Drawing on a limited archive of photographs and anecdotes, Bertoli presents a spatial collage or performance document that recontextualises the play, creating a ‘continuous moment’ through and across time.

Bertoli’s project explores the complexity of appropriation and the idea of revisiting historical works or events. Picasso’s text was itself informed by Plato’s symposium, Dada, and Surrealism and psychoanalysis. Written against the backdrop of wartime Paris, its premiere performance in 1967 as a psychedelic Happening negotiated late-1960s counterculture; now considered in terms of contemporary art practice, the play operates as a temporal pivot point.