São José do Egito, 1985. Lives in São Paulo
“Mrs. D., housewife, 74, was diagnosed with an unusual psychosis because of her belief that her husband had been replaced by another man. She refused to sleep with the ‘impostor’, locked her bedroom door at night, asked her son to get her a gun, and fought with the police when they attempted to commit her. She recognized all the other members of her family, but not her husband.” Based on his analysis of this strange case from 1923, the French psychiatrist Jean Marie Joseph Capgras recognized the illness that he called “illusion of the doubles”, which was latter named after him, as Capgras delusion, a disorder in which a rupture between the visual and emotional memories makes people believe that someone close to them has been replaced by an impostor.
What do the Capgras delusion, Apotemnophobia, Velázquez’s Las meninas, David Carradine and Chelsea Manning have in common? Apparently disconnected, these themes and figures are mixed together in the performance Plums of Chelsea Manning. Alone on the darkened stage of the Sesc Sorocaba theater, Deyson Gilbert speaks an invented Germanic language, sends WhatsApp messages to the audience and exhibits slides with the help of a complete stranger handpicked at the start of the presentation. Organized as a five-part play, the presentation invokes themes of sensory experience of the world, of lack, of unconscious actions, and of the end of history. Major, complex and unsolvable, these concepts are sewn together with a thread of associative logic and a dose of uncanniness, producing the fascination of proximity to some unfathomable mystery. After all, certain processes are visible and present, but then something happens and we can no longer recognize them, just like Mrs. D and her husband.
[J. A]
