Elia has written many texts as part of her performance pieces, and not necessarily to be published as such. Once the action has passed, fragments remain in old notebooks and loose pages, in the memory of those who saw the performance, and possibly in her own memory, mixed with images or perhaps obscured by the very same images. In this way, Elia’s exercise of writing has been in the service of embodied action. Her texts, moreover, are not born to be unalterable, but rather remain subject to changes dictated by the moment and the ephemeral nature of the actions. For even if a piece is repeated, it only happens rarely and never in a precise manner. A text, when it emerges as part of the process of conceiving of a performance, is destined to be displayed with the entire body, and not by print technology. Only per the request of a few magazine editors have some of Elia’s texts been printed, acquiring a life beyond the context of a performance or a stage. And not every text spoken as part of a performance can be easily understood once it is printed, for without flesh and blood, it could very well lose its intelligibility and its force. Many spoken texts would cease to interpellate their audiences, deprived of the images and the symbolic support that a body can provide. This offers us an idea of the function and the place of a written text in performance pieces. At the same time, it loosely explains why many people who work as performance artists do not view themselves as writers, even though, given their actions, it may seem that some of them could say, without reservation, that they also work as writers.
