A Kills B

A kills B is an experimental collective that brings together two artists that merge into a third identity. Green Monochrome was a performance that took place in an industrial paint warehouse. It begins with the entrance of two characters wearing protective gas masks. One of them walks to the only object present in the space, some drums, and starts playing. The other character finishes isolating the room and starts to paint the ceiling, floor and walls, the whole surface, green, using a paint spray gun. The drumming goes on and on, interrupted only by the equally non-stop noise of the spray. The two actions occur separately and simultaneously, until the spray gun breaks down and the painting has to stop – the unexpected occurs, an accident, a flaw in the staging. The tension is created by this unexpected moment; the action is resumed until the musician is completely covered by an undivided, sloughy surface. The rhythm doesn’t stop. The video documentation of the performance creates a field of representation that summarizes in an image what occurred over a length of time: a space inhabited by constrained figures (remitting to the images/sensations produced by Francis Bacon), viewed from a clouded window, where the air made real by the sound becomes unbreathable (evoking the sounding enigma of Marcel Duchamp’s Le Grand Verre). The interdisciplinary experiments carried out by the avant-gardes in the early 20th century share with this performance, Green Monochrome, the fascination with the industrial and the mechanical – concepts updated by the irreverence of this project, A kills B, in which two artists challenge the quality of their own practices to discover a new and plural experience.