Eliza Soroga: Intimacy, Influence, and Unstable Meaning
Among Soroga’s works, The Oppression of Intimacy holds particular significance for how it crystallised her thinking around audience, gaze, and unpredictability. This multimedia performance begins without explanation, with the audience unaware that they themselves are the subject. A live camera films them in real time, projecting their image onto a large screen as they watch. The initial realisation produces shock and awkwardness, intensified by the moving camera that borrows cinematic language through zooms and close framings. Hands, eyes, ears, and small involuntary gestures are brought into extreme proximity, creating a sense of forced closeness. Accompanied by a gentle piano piece by John Cage, played live or recorded, each iteration unfolds differently, sometimes ending in laughter, sometimes in unexpected emotion.
What makes the work enduring for Soroga is its capacity to escape control. In one performance on the outskirts of London, a mother and daughter were framed alone on screen, and when the daughter began to cry, the situation shifted into something unplanned and unresolved. Audience responses ranged from descriptions of cruelty to accounts of deep captivation, with one person remarking that unlike a mirror, the performance offered no exit. Others noted how the prolonged, unavoidable intimacy felt oppressive, pointing to the central tension between agency and passivity. Some spectators attempted to perform for the camera, while most remained still, unsure how to behave. For Soroga, these reactions reveal how looking is never neutral and how intimacy, when imposed rather than chosen, can become a form of pressure and control.
Her influences help clarify the foundations of this approach. Cinema has been central, particularly the work of Roy Andersson, whose use of stillness, repetition, and composed frames shaped her thinking around duration and collective behaviour. She also draws from Agnès Varda’s attentiveness to people and places, alongside the observational and surreal strategies of Éric Rohmer, Luis Buñuel, and Wim Wenders. In sound and composition, John Cage’s ideas around chance and listening have informed her understanding of structure beyond conventional narrative. Performance influences include butoh founder Kazuo Ohno and her long collaboration with Geraldine Pilgrim, which profoundly shaped her understanding of site-specific composition. Thinkers such as Guy Debord and Dadaist practices further contribute to a practice that values precision and risk, where form is carefully constructed while meaning remains deliberately unstable.
