Performing Ethos: International Journal of Ethics in Theatre & Performance - Online First

This article offers a critical and self-reflective analysis of Symptom, a long-duration performance created and performed by the author, Yiannis Pappas, under the auspices of the Marina Abramović Institute. Framed as both aesthetic expression and ethical provocation, the performance engages with Freud’s dialectic of the death and life drives, Susan Sontag’s reflections on spectatorship and suffering, Hannah Arendt’s political philosophy, Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the grotesque body and Simone Weil’s idea of personal reckoning. Situated within the culturally neutral context of Switzerland, Symptom deliberately unsettles passive spectatorship by invoking the ethics of witnessing through silence, duration, slowness and opacity as essential resistance to the spectacle and desensitization of contemporary media. Drawing on the author’s embodied practice, the article positions performance as a site of confrontation, where the absence of narrative and the refusal of catharsis foreground the viewer’s implicated gaze. The reception of the performance, marked by discomfort and haunting after-effects, underscores its effectiveness in disrupting visual consumption and demanding ethical attention.