search>site>scan>three sisters (2018)

Single channel video/ performance/ live feed video

Performed at the Images Festival, April 20th, 2018 for the Redacting Bodies program curated by Alexandra Gelis.

search>site>scan>three sisters is an evolving video performance that is the offshoot of a research and web based archive and video project called search that was begun in 2003. Search explores the historical role and influence of colonial epistemologies and military on visual technologies and how these intervene in our relations to the land, our bodies and communities.

Shifting angles from the military, search>site>scan>three sisters maintains a concern with the radical interrogation of how representational frameworks relate to histories, lived experience, and the gendered body. The video sets up an abstraction of the body through various representational forms: military surveillance and mapping, modern art, psychoanalytic lenses, and medical imaging which are then intervened upon by the body’s lived experience in the anthropocene: of a colonial relation to land, and its symptoms on a particular gendered body. The performance of masquerading femininity becomes a joke that eludes the impacts of industrial agriculture on the female anatomy.

Moving on from the prosthetic feminine, a radically transformed architecture of desire is proposed: an engagement with the complexities of how our bodies are sustained through relations to the land and other beings and ways of knowing and desiring. The video cannot contain the generation of symbolic forms that operate not from abstraction, but from a wholistic, material, organic inter-relational ethos, and move out as performance into the actual space of possibility and reciprocity.

undergoing    radical transformation