Place: Helsinki
Date: August 2024
Event: Outsider Art Festival

The following introduction was read by the festival’s host to the audience:

“In Businessman Salad, Isaque Sanches has compiled a manuscript, made from a collage of loose texts, presented in a kaleidoscopic and frenetic dance.
“The words flash, grow, shrink, vibrate. They are alive.

“The texts are by people identifying as LGBTQ+, including the author himself. The subjects’ thoughts were collected for this exact purpose, and with their consent, through live interviews, essay-writing, journal-writing, surrealist-style cadavre exquis, etc.

“The manuscript would only be readable if the subject could get close enough, but whenever they do so, the text shuts down. The dance stops.
“And so, the manuscript cannot be read, only felt.”

 

 

CREDITS

Actor / Video / Setup:
Isaque Sanches

Audio:
Gonçalo Guiomar

Text:
The end-result manuscript is a fragmented collage of different texts, by many people. They are…
— Ana Lopes 
— Antti M.
— Maria Giraldes
— Rhea Nebgen
— Tiago Sanches
— “aasci” 
— “Cystyr”
— “EOLOS”
— “hallaghan”
— “Quendera”
— “Tekuno”
…and other people who requested to remain anonymous.

SEQUEL

A “companion” installation (with the same title) was later built by repurposing the setup and artwork used in the performance.
Instead of a stage, the sensor and projector were installed in a closet-like room, and ran contunously throughout several days.
For more information of the installation, see this page.

ABSTRACT

Why ‘businessman salad’? Does it mean anything? Should it mean anything?
The two words seem unrelated. Why not another random pair? Maybe that’s the point: ‘businessman’ and ‘salad’ could be two entities, two different people even. A salad, as an image, seems trivial and inoffensive. A businessman evokes an opposite baggage: hierarchy, prestige, power, subjugation. A businessman gives and takes. A salad is just a salad.

Whatever, whoever, is this businessman salad, it’s always hidden, incomprehensible, forever weird, exotic and out of reach — if someone gets closer, it hides, it closes itself. Maybe they are of two genders: the ‘man’ part of businessman betrays its maleness; is a salad more female, somehow?
They could also be two personas, one hidden, the other exposed. If they are two people, one of them, the salad, should at least be healthy, light, positive, fresh, and so on. The other one, the hidden one, could be as grotesque as it needs to be. Or could it be the other way around? Is the mask the macho manly bro dude in a suit, and the fragile fruity vegetable thing the real one, the one that must hide to survive.
It’s impossible to know. The answer to the first two questions, then, are: no, it shouldn’t mean anything, and as such: no, it probably doesn’t.

Ignorable gibberish, most likely. All of it probably written by equally ignorable people. If we can’t understand any of it, why should we care?