Student essay written in en (native language: French, CEFR level: C1, field of study: Arts)

Performance art is considered to be one of the most intriguing categories of art. Indeed, its results often suprise people, or even disgust them. To discuss performance art and how it is percieved, I will use the example of the performance 
Counting the Rice
 by the artist Alex Dupont. Firts, I will describe it and then I will discuss the artist's intentions behind this performance.
To begin, 
Counting the rice
 is a performance that was organized for the first time in 2015. Alex Dupont invited guests to participate in this experiment, as it is often the case with performance art. Each guest was placed at a geometric rice counting desk that were custom made for this performance. As the title of the performance indicates, each guest was tasked to count individual grains of rice and to keep track of it. But they had to do this for a few hours. Therefore, this performance turned into a sort of long and durational activity, which felt a bit tedious for some guests as it was very long. To make it even more difficult, the grains of rice were mixed with lentils which the guests had to seperate from the grains of rice they had to count. During this experience, event though all the guests were gathered in the same room, they were all isolated since they were all so focused on this demanding task.
Now, lets see what the artist intended with this performance. This work might appear a bit strange or unclear as it is quite difficult to understand why it was organized. As nearly every performance that exists,
 Counting the rice
 is an invitation to think, to reflect about our lives. Indeed, with this project Alex Dupont wanted guests to have a time to reflect on our use of free time. With modern technologies, which of course are not all bad and provide great advantages, it seems our perception and use of free time have changed. Nowadays, some people don't even know what to do with their free time anymore. We became so used to constant stimulation from our phones, Internet and social media that free time has turned into scrolling time. If you take a look at a break room in a work place or at reccess in a highschool, you will very probably observe that a great majority of people spend this time on their phones. It is lie people don't know what to do without technology anymore. Before, when all of this didn't exist, people had better uses of their free time and their perception of it was completely different. According to the artist, 
Counting the rice
 is about that and about reclaiming our free time. She tinks that doing such a simple, repetitive and durational activity for a few hours can enhance a sort of meditative state for people. She once said that if you can't count grains of rice for a few hours, you can't do anything good in life. I agree with that because it really shows how accustomed we became to being constantly stimulated with new things or changes, to the point that such activities, which in a way are similar to work that we now let robots or machine do in factories, became almost to difficult for us to focus on.
Overall, 
Counting the rice
 is a quite classic performance. With the help of guests who didn't know what they were about to do and a prompt that was given to them, Alex Dupont tried to demonstrate and denounce something. Altough it may appear obscure, once we know about the artist's motivations, this performance makes a lot of sense, especially now with kids being exposed to social media and screens at a younger age than ever. Reclaiming our free time, away from modern technologies and their impact on our perception of it, appears to be very important. And an activity such as counting grains of rice was the perfect example to highlight this changed aspect of our daily lives.