Judith Blackall (JB): Mike, 2023 has been a great year for you, with two large-scale exhibition projects curated by Eugenio Viola focusing on more than fifty years of your performance work. How did this come about?
Mike Parr (MP): I met Eugenio Viola for the first time in the company of Giuseppe Morra following Hermann Nitsch’s edition of Das Orgien Mysterien Theater for Dark Mofo in 2017. I’d also been invited to perform at the festival and in the aftermath of Nitsch’s performance I received an invitation to the dinner hosted in his honour. I had first met Nitsch in 1978 when we were both performing at a festival in Vienna and in the years following that first meeting we met again on various occasions. So Nitsch was responsible in Hobart for introducing me to both Giuseppe Morra and Eugenio Viola, though Eugenio already knew a good deal about my work being a scholar who had specialised in the history of Post-war performance and a curator who had worked with some of the major figures of international performance art of the last fifty years. After the meeting in Hobart, Giuseppe Morra and Teresa Carnevale, another principal at Fondazione Morra in Naples, visited me at my studio in Sydney. It was an exhilarating meeting. Morra has limited English, so Teresa acted as our translator. I showed some early videotapes, The First Body Program of 1973 [eleven pieces] and the more recent La Triviata/Bad Son, 2010–13.
I was a performance artist with one arm. Nothing could be more conspicuous than that
After the screening of the films, Giuseppe Morra sprang up and hugged me. Shortly afterwards, I left for Berlin for ten months. Returning to Australia the following year to do , I travelled via Naples at Giuseppe’s invitation to visit the Fondazione Morra. It was there, in the company of Eugenio Viola, Giuseppe Morra, and other principals of the Foundation that the idea for my exhibition was born. When Eugenio was appointed Chief Curator at MAMBO, the decision was taken to extend my exhibition to both venues. The emphasis was always going to be on my performance work. This thrilled me. An exhibition and performances were being planned
