As Savariego describes in the Q&A session after the performance, to him, the tangible space of his real life differs to how he inhabits online spaces. In such spaces, “technical elements are corrupting the material,” and so “Slapdash” is an exercise in trying to shed the layers, and reduce the material. What begins as a repetition of steps in near-silence carries with it a “sense of worry and dread”[3]. Watching Savariego repeat sequences, the only audible sounds are his effort, which is deliberately not hidden from the viewer, and that of the click, click of the photographer documenting the process, standing to the side of where I am sitting. It comes as a relief when Savariego breaks the silence, but this relief is quickly dispelled for the noise is generated by him repeatedly beating his own chest until it appears red. Each thud to the heart weighs heavily: “at the beginning I exist as an object, not as me”. In shedding the layers of performance to reveal a “motly assemblage of influences” vying for attention, the process was alluded to upon entry, and “rips, crumples, cuts, shoves”[4] take on meanings independent to collage. In the performance or recording of a deliberately uncomfortable process of self-judgment and harm, in one, and burial in the other, a further way that relates Savariego’s “Slapdash” to Arnatt’s nine photographs, to me, emerges.

In “Slapdash” Savariego address the perceived shortcomings of the body’s ability and fatigue, and the shortcomings and reliability of the copy of a copy. In the degradation of an image copied several times over, physical abrasions occur. In the digital realm, this ‘generation loss’ accumulates, and like the lossy format of the jpeg, Savariego, runs through his steps, altering bit by bit. The body, too, is an exhaustible machine. A packet of Dorritos is opened.