|
Other work |
Kitchen presentation at Dutch Art Institute, Zeeland, November 30th, 2019 Reading on The People's microphone – spatial audio piece (11:00min) An after echo of performative act, in the context of a workshop on queering trauma ; looking at connections between space/land, time and responses of trauma within patriarchal and capitalistic structures. This took place during Xarkis Festival, Polystipos, Cyprus (16th,17th and 18th of August.) Please listen with headphones Workshop and performative act, trying to connect presence in space and time and resisting capitalist thought, through idea's on recovery of desire related to trauma and disconnect it from failure and reclaim ideas of experience outside of capitalist dominance and space. Workshop; people from Cyprus, Romania, England, Netherlands, Poland, different gender, ages and background and many different reasons for their political engagement, from drag to writing about communist regimes to the hyper personal and relating it to political history. What is queering trauma and time? Trauma itself repeats the same shit of events while being in the present, through the senses: auditory, visual or tactile. How can we reclaim experiences without definitions of internalised harmful corporate thought? We are all moving around in a world with designated places, designated movement and policies of care. Capitalist structures aim towards a heteronormative linear idea of these experiences while they already were hurting by the experience itself. This while the body is still elsewhere in experience via this residue of violence. Capitalism blames the victim for not being better or to function under all circumstances, hence de-humanising individuals. But what is 'better'? Traumatised people have the unique power to re-invent time as preventative self care; a fight flight or freeze response can make sure you are avoiding or remake the past or futures. From the Amygdala, a part of the brain growing to serve direct action ; often fight, flight or freeze responses as defense mechanism – a dissociation, creating an elsewhere as necessity. A traumatised person may experience a physical growth of the Amygdala inducing fear, but also creating space for improvisational ways of survival. The workshop made us reconsider patriarchal violence and heteronormativity as a dominant way of claiming or taking over space, land and linearity of time. The group argued we can see potential futures within this re-experience of a terrorised pasts by letting go of dominant idea's of desire, pain and care. Many people who survive trauma are terrorised more by nightmares of their (non) responsive surroundings then the act of violence itself. A traumatised mind and body actually maintains many powers, that need to be explored outside of formalistic universal concepts; there is no choice but to think outside neo-liberal capitalism as many do not function within the normative anyway. There is a way of refusing these ideas on functioning. Or at least in many cases the role can not be fulfilled or kept up within the cycle of 1. capitalism causing hurt by normalising ideas on desire and success 2. blaming victims not functioning within capitalism and labour, etc. 3. erasing or not recognise experiences as valuable and multiplying repetitive violent acts A traumatised body in many ways reflects a counter-reaction to the idea of the 'natural', the way to success and other idea's of progression as something that just 'happens'. Being stuck in time or somewhere on the timelines made me and many with me, travel to different places in time simultaneously; refusing the now you could say. Here I will give some context on dissociation Dissociative Disorder(ly) : Dissociative disorderly people have conditions that involve disruptions or breakdowns of memory, awareness, identity, or perception. People with dissociative disorderly conditions use the blur and time skipping as a defence mechanism. To quote Clementine Morrigan, a queer Canadian writer and activist; “While I admit that flashbacks are exhausting, nightmares are horrifying, dissociation can be uncomfortable, disorientation can be confusing, and hypervigilance can be extremely inconvenient, I also must assert that I love my embodied experience of queer trauma time. Not being attached to linear, normative time has produced a flexible, imaginative way of being in the world.” We can see this as an improvised state of being as survival. Queering trauma can be seen as a collective need to voice individual and collective stories and pose them outside of terminology of capitalism. One voice becomes many to reclaim idea's on failure and disability and desire. Not as a #metoo movement for the viral element of it, but as rethinking trauma as thinking otherwise together, listening as a responsibility, instead of consuming stories of victimisation. The pauses the rhythm, the repetition and the awkward silences in between, that you are gonna here in the audio piece, are just as much part of the story. This became a collective text, a so called remix ; an endless try out that also was very enjoyable. The title of the workshop ; The people's microphone .... took place this time in a village, in a micro- setting, just as a DAI week, we landed in a place. Cyprus and it's historical context, showing the complexity of the half colonised island in everybody's daily life. From temporal housing becoming permanent, to collective trauma by state law, gendered and obligatory military service. It was very relevant as it depends on the personal history if the border is recognised and who created it and who keeps on creating it by gendered repetition. As I am interested in the connotation of home, feeling home, taking and making space, by revisitation of history and trauma and resistance, I was honoured to work on our temporal collective writing as an audio piece. 'The people's microphone' creates alternative anthems by using voices as echo/amplification, similar to the Occupy movement tactics. I asked them questions on how to connect space, time and gender, through idea's of collectivity, a revisitation of history and trauma as affect using queer theory. Only one text is my own, the rest is not written by me, I just suggested a methodology. If personal stories relating to gender show borders, regularly connected to hurt, how can we break those borders? Use the negative (idea's on shame, vulnerability, failure) as power tools. And overall; how to use non-linear ways of thinking about activism? Bits-and-pieces, coming from different moments in time, memory/thoughts on potential futures or painful pasts can change through communication and storytelling. Who is heard? Borders created by gender are produced by capitalist cycles of claiming desire and reproduced by many, through structures of shaming, victim blaming and other patriarchal constructs. While we all want to move beyond trauma, the part of our brain that is devoted to ensuring our survival from that is seen as negative. But we see potential in taking action, rethinking otherwise, in not finding “a cure” as survival if this means becoming “better” in the capitalist sense of the word. We are fine with not being fine enough. Maybe you don't consider yourself an activist, but what your body and mind went through creates a different way of thinking, mental disorder is a construct, a cure is an idea of progression claimed by capitalism controlling- and functioning on harm. By creating alternative temporary anthems, that we together amplified with our voice, we were creating and remixing, we made value commitments in the act of saying them, just for a moment in time, that can not be taken away within that moment. They are not anthems relating to nation, but related to the complexity of non-linear idea's on activism and vulnerability. To shout is to release, to change. To conclude and connect this all to sound I want to add; By using sound and voice, improvisation as a conceptual tools, letting other spaces resonate with stories and different frequencies, we tried to collectively write during the residency, telling alternative storylines in a non-linear way as form of resistance. Reflecting on hurt as way of rethinking, fragmenting, reconsidering and reconstructing vulnerability without the capitalist claiming of it. We should amplify all layers, let them resonate, take space to see the potential of hurt bodies to counter the oppression by which we were hurt in the first place." ALL AUDIO WAS MADE DURING THE WORKSHOP IN THE VILLAGE OF POLYSTIPOS TOGETHER WITH THE LOCAL RESIDENTS. In this audio you will find yourself in the intersections of language, culture and comfort. In particular; English, Cypriot Greek and Romanian, we used the 3 languages, which connected and divided the same space. |
