⬤ — Different

Bodies, Private Home

Different Bodies (performance documentation), October 2017, performance lecture and happening, 3 h.

Whilst Different Bodies was not a part of the live examination experience and so does not form a major analysis in the exegesis, its influence in the design method (multi-part, multi-level performance installation, set in a suburban home, surrounding park and waterway) and content of The Capital is important to articulate. To aide in this, I engage a key component to Rosi Braidotti’s nomadic method that use “creative repetitions… reconfiguring the concept, phenomena, event, or location from different angles” to promote a “qualitative leap of perspectives” (Braidotti 2010, 412). Both projects explore ideas of labour and the precarious class, and the importance of criticality and creativity (resistance) to economies of scale. Importantly though, each new configuration or exploration of these concepts opens new possible “lines of interaction” (Springgay and Truman 2017, 217). Where one project asks us to participate in a direct exploration of the ideas of universal basic income and freed time via lecture and forum, the other seeks a more somatic connection via contemplative sculpture assembled amongst other works relating to connected struggles for identity and autonomy.

Across the PhD project I attempted to deconstruct hegemonic subjecthood in both personal and collective dimensions. Through this process, I reimagined what else these (me and the world of others I am a part of) could become. This reimagining is particularly evident in the performance actions Different Bodies, Emergent Urgency, and Arbitrary Distinction (the latter two are reprised in The Capital as video shorts). In these works, I underwent a series of deconstructions of identity which included transforming gender and name, altering my body, and representing myself through another. Via performance lectures and other texts, I connected these processes to geopolitical issues such as the nation state’s protectionist and extractive tendencies that result in war and dispossession affecting civic subjecthood. Using creative and symbolic imagery such as flags, heels, military garb, hair, smoke, crutches, and water, I sought alternative modes of subjectification for my own body [1], and whilst performing my feminine aspect, proposed alternative models of relationality to the nation state that incorporates autonomy, self-determination and cosmolocalism.

In one such action in Different Bodies (2017), after presenting a lecture on contemporary capital and the necro-political perils of the corporatist, military state, I immersed myself into a body of water dressed as ‘io’ who represents a feminine persona of my patrilineal line. In the water I attached myself to a military suit, that had been worn in a previous performance, now covered in the flags of the USA and UK, rigged to a fly tied between two trees. I move backward and forward until the suit and flags disappeared in the muck of the brown river, and I lay face down floating in the water.  “These are figurations for specific geo-political and historical locations. To mistake them for mere metaphors would be to miss the point altogether. Figurations are forms of literal expression that bring into representation that which the system had declared off-limits.” (Braidotti, pg 410). By locating this and related works in the spaces I am privileged to access (university, studio, international travel, domestic home), and providing “alternative figurations or schemes of representation for these locations, in terms of power as restrictive (potestas) but also empowering or affirmative (potentia)” I am, in the spirit of this methodology, making the first “move towards a vision of subjectivity as ethically accountable and politically empowering.” (Braidotti, pg 410). I do this for multiple and obvious reasons. One of the main intentions being that it is an effective way to engage the political through the personal, with the aim to empower a resistant force in myself that opens me to empathetically engage with others.

[1] The connection between the trans-body and the move toward the feminine with alternative and radical modes of understanding polity has been drawn from multiple sources including the theories of Reich, Rosenberg and Sartre as brought together by social theorist Jairus Banaji, which I unpack further in the chapter on practice. Ultimately though, and how this relates to Braidotti’s Nomadic methodology is the dual move that feminism makes as a critical theory in the 20th century. For Braidotti feminism is radical because it is both critical and creative. The criticality opens the space whilst the creative proposes a new ways and modes.