Ecce Homo
Pablo Pakula

Fri 17 April
8:00- 9:30pm
Duration: 90 mins
Access Key: BSL

In this one-off and time-responsive piece Pablo Pakula will prepare and consume a black pudding made from his own blood.

Located under the long shadow cast by the AIDS crisis, the work is not just a re-imagining of the Christian eucharist but also draws on the figure of the sin-eater, one who consumes the sins and sorrows of the dead. A ritual in the Celtic tradition that peaked between the 17th to 19th century, in this practice a person would eat a meal of bread and beer in the presence of the recently deceased – symbolically taking on their sins and absolving the soul for passage into heaven.

The title, Latin for “behold the man”, recalls Pontius Pilate’s words as he presented the scourged Christ to the crowd; words which emphasised Christ’s humiliated human condition. In Christian spirituality, this moment and the words “Ecce Homo” became a site of meditation on suffering, compassion, and sacrificial love. At the same time, the work’s challenge to radical self-knowledge and self-affirmation, defiantly refusing the strictures of imposed morality, echoes some of the ideas in Nietzsche’s posthumous and homonymous autobiography (Ecce Homo, 1908)

Inhabiting the threshold between the sacred and the sacrilegious, Ecce Homo is a rite of queer becoming and rebirth that not only symbolises something, but seeks to make it present and manifest. Embracing what is normally hidden, repudiated and stigmatised it attempts the transmutation of vulnerability and shame in a sacrament of remembrance and resilience. The audience is invited, as a congregation of active witnesses, to partake in this tenderly transgressive liturgy.

Credits:

Conceived, written and performed by Pablo Pakula.

Content Notes:
Physical depiction of blood and needle, discussion of sexual transmitted infections, references to homophobia, audience interaction & invitation to consume food.

:::

Pablo Pakula is a European mongrel based in Birmingham. His work feels most at home situated in the here-and-now, flirting with risk, and dancing on the knife-edge between the planned and the spontaneous. He employs musicalisation and materiality as visceral strategies to bypass discursive language and rational thought. Although his practice is socially engaged, it rejects a ‘message’, tackling complex subjects in poetic ways that playfully straddle the solemn and the carnivalesque, the holy and the prophane, genuine emotion and irreverent irony.

He believes in the potential efficacy and affect of ritual. Employing devices such as lists and repetition, seeking to open meditative spaces within his work. Rather than making pronouncements, he wishes to raise questions and embrace multiplicity, fostering the subjectivity of audience members; inviting them to find alternative ways of seeing, understanding, and feeling.

A focus on the liveness of performance has led to an interest in time-specific works that mark special occasions or dates. For instance, responding to the public’s outpouring of grief following the death of Queen Elizabeth II, his 2022 performance “a necrology” culminated in a durational public intervention on the day of her funeral, in which he drew a line in chalk whilst crawling on his hands and knees across Westminster Bridge in London.