I’m irritated by stories which suggest ruination or demand total recovery. When I look at myself, I see someone sitting at the crossroads; perpetually.
I’m irritated by stories which suggest ruination or demand total recovery. When I look at myself, I see someone sitting at the crossroads; perpetually.
SECOND FLOOR
The second floor explores the erotic, the dovetailing of fiction and research, and the power of personal narrative.
In one room, the audience was invited to dig through an antique box of explicit sexual content created during a time where I was desperately trying to redefine my own erotic image, especially as a queer woman who is chronically ill and forever pulling myself out of the physical damage endured from a lifetime of anorectic behavior. The photographs, titled “After Fuses” in homage to Carolee Schneemann’s landmark video Fuses, were accompanied by my essay “Silver Tableaux: Memoir Vivant.” Surrounding this content were books on anorexia, memoir, and auto theoretical image production. Two performers resided in this bedroom, posed across the large antique bed. The queer couple were awash in fuchsia light, alternating between turning their bedside light on and off. When sitting upright, their light was on, while their partner rested beside them, reaching for their partner.
The other room took on a different tone. Dominant in this room was literature that had inspired much of the aesthetics, tone, and flavor of my writing. This room featured a printed copy of the lesbian romance novel that I publish online for young queer femmes and sapphics. This novel was being released, chapter by chapter, in tandem with the images in the antique box over the course of 2022 and 2023. Writing the novel began on my 2022 pilgrimage to London; where I vowed to begin again, start over, after a very dark time. The two performers in this room alternate between reading to one another, sitting upon the other, and traveling up and down the stairs; locked into each other.
Between these bedrooms is a landing, where traveling performers created mobile vignettes. This space was sonically punctuated by the singing in the stairwell, the voices of those reading, and the utterances of the traveling performers.
+First Bedroom +
+ Landing +
+ Second Bedroom +
First Bedroom
In the first bedroom, an interrogation was made of fragile sexuality: what does the body become and do when it is try to recuperate from disastrous starvation? How does one reclaim sexuality for oneself, seperated from an ableist construct?
The AFTER FUSES images were generated over the course of a year, wherein I was recovering from a descent into anorexia. The essay that accompanied these images was published in Performance Studies International’s edition of HUNGER, where my documentation and research discussing self-starvation, micro-celebrity and public-facing image, and sexuality were processed.
“When I look into the warped, de-silvering mirrors of my living room, I see someone new every time; fragmented tableaux, occluded expanses of flesh dappled by mirror rot. There is nothing fixed about the body; it alters under environmental influences. Stress contorts me, relief expands me, disappointment shrivels me. I withdraw; I come back when the duress passes; I go retrograde once again due to some new issue. All visible, yet partially inaccessible, in these antique mirrors. It’s a looped vanishing act of flesh and muscle that only highlights the body’s presence and my responsibility to it. In this circuit of addition and subtraction, the whole system rings, stings, and babbles with unexplained, unspecified pain. The discomfort consumes one’s focus, even as one attempts to not think about the reality or responsibility of inhabiting a vessel that requires regular care; consistent attention. I stare at my face, and I see the grimace caused by the burning at the back of my throat and nostrils; oddly metallic and silvery. It tastes vaguely like the combination of a cup of black coffee and a burst battery…
Purposefully, arousal becomes a dim memory while in this circuit of gain and loss. Despite how I may flirt with that reflective surface, suggesting desire as I take a photograph of myself that purports wanton abandon or is merely a bodycheck, I have at different times worked hard to suppress my body’s libido so as to eradicate the threat of desire. When one pushes the body to a certain point, the ability to orgasm is stolen from the form which aims to eradicate itself. Genitals and other sensitive spots on the body feel like aching bruises, and it hurts to wear pants, or anything structured; further support to abandon passion so as to remain “safe.” It’s hard to reach for that thing, desire, when the promise of joy and satisfaction appears to be a blatant lie or something wholly inaccessible. It has always felt safer to find a means to eradicate desire, than be disappointed by it.”
Excerpt from “Silver Tableaux: Memoir Vivant”
“What I am interested in is staring at that image before me and asking what is that? And why? If some form of comfort or “healing” comes from developing a deeper understanding as to why starvation feels like an appropriate response to exterior threats, then I am thankful. If understanding leads to new ways of operating in the world, alleviating suffering, then I feel blessed. Yet, through taking images of myself and committing to a memoir-practice and studying well-known micro-celebrities and memoirists who have become symbols of the unrecoverable and the bountiful gift of recovery, I have come to a place of frustration. I ask, especially within this memoir practice, what about sitting firmly within one’s current state, knowing that fully emerging out of “illness” or recovering from bodily disruption isn’t possible? What about refuting the ableist construct that in order to live a full life, one that is imbued with desire, pleasure, joy, and want, one must be completely “healed” or better first? There is value in writing from and generating understanding right where one currently is; “healthy” or not.”
Excerpt from “Silver Tableaux: Memoir Vivant”
Landing
Second Bedroom
This bedroom interrogated fiction and non-fiction, religious weight in literature, and eroticism. Here, my incomplete novel PARTNERSHIP outlined pervasive, sapphic desire amidst a criminal investigation. Heavily inspired by Anne Rice and her progressive, inventive means to display religion and unyielding lust, this novel welcomed people into the world I had generated for online consumption.
NOTATIONS
