A lecture performance presented at the VLC Forum 2025: Matter of Intelligence, Vera List Center for Art and Politics, The New School, NYC
Click: Video recording of full performance
(question–repeat–failure–record) is a choreographic lecture performance by Sandra Erbacher and Ruth Estévez, conceived as the first chapter in their evolving inquiry into the fraught history and enduring impact of intelligence testing. Taking the test as both subject and structure, the performance traces its entanglements with gendered ideologies and systems of bureaucratic control. Erbacher and Estévez explore how intelligence has been constructed and instrumentalized through data, language, sound, architecture, gesture, and institutional form, revealing how such tests privilege Western rationality and exclude embodied ways of knowing. The performance interweaves historical and contemporary examples of how intelligence has been used to police bodies—particularly female, racialized, and neurodivergent bodies. Archival documents, trial transcripts, media clippings, and actual intelligence test questions are “performed” through montage, not as an aesthetic device, but as a means to challenge history’s presumed linearity, treating these materials not as inert evidence but as performable scores that resist closure. In this process, they attempt to unlearn normative metrics of intelligence and re-examine the forms of knowledge that have long been excluded, allowing phenomena and documents to “die” only to be reborn in new states and gestures.
above: Spread 1, part of a commissioned piece published in the VLC Forum Catalog 2025
below: Stills from The Perfect Human, 2025
below left: still from video Feature Profile, 2025; right: performance at VLC Forum 2025
Below: film stills, The Memory Chain, 2025; click to watch: full video
Above: Spread 3, part of a commissioned piece published in the VLC Forum Catalog 2025.
Press: Art Review by Jenny Wu (link to full article)
How, in this sense, might ‘language against intelligence’ sound? Perhaps like parody, à la (question–repeat–failure–record) (2025), a lecture-performance by artists Sandra Erbacher and Ruth Estévez that took place at the Vera List Center Forum the morning after Pasquinelli’s keynote. Here, the performers took up the subject of intelligence by conducting research on women such as Carrie Buck and Britney Spears who’d had their rights stripped on account of their perceived aptitude. Throughout the performance, Erbacher and Estévez volleyed invasive questions excerpted from archival documents, trial transcripts, press clippings and IQ tests across a table: “Are your parents living?” “Could you still live with them?” “Can you feed yourself or do you prefer to be fed by others?” Their mutual interrogation was intermittently paused when old-timey instruction videos for visualising the ‘perfect human’ and implementing mnemonic techniques were projected on screens in the lecture hall and rapidly devolved into pointed absurdities: “How many buttons do you have on your jacket?” “Do we want to perform a test that everybody can pass?” “How should a normal person be compared to another normal person?”