march on airports

3.3.2010 I had a long day of flying. i detest the security controls at the airports, the way they make me feel fearful and the way they reconfirm the politics of fear that we practice to legitimize our different actions in the world. Going through a lot of those checks, 4 in one day, made me think about what i am working on with my thesis. The way that these policies and politics affect our bodies.

Landing from all that to Eugene, OR, where David Sommerville, whom i had never met before, had made cookies, warmed up the sauna and made a bed for me, was like stepping into a different world.

The things we do to each other as humans.
The way we create inhumane environments and force ourselves to live in them because it is for the best and because of our own safety. We create environments where we have to shut down our senses of smell and hearing to not go crazy. This then becomes normal. To live in cities, cars, highways, universities, airports, we have to handicap ourselves to survive.
And then there are places called Homes. Where you can let all your street survival mechanisms go. Doesn't it make you cry to enter into one of these havens? Have you created one for yourself? How does it feel?

sk/in... to touch - a dilemma

vienna 260210

i kind of knew they are parts of the same piece.

i was even using parts of the music of "sk/in/visibility" in the first soundtrack of "touch" to act as a reminder, when they were performed in the same night with several pieces inbetween.

i think i will wrap the bread in the same cloth with which i later blindfold myself.

but if they are parts of the same piece, should it be viewed in two parts, or should the bread sharing move into the circle and continue somehow... and a some how that would not seem too corny and ritualistic?

and yes, i know that in a way i am a priest and it is a ritual, but there is no need to underline it, it is visible enough. i want it to be an invitation deeper in, to come deeper in the cave

because it is a cave

it is not an altar

it is an alter

maybe there has to be some words, some story in between

i think that i will just call the whole thing touch.

no to sloppy thinking

being this lazy with my mind is an insult to the creator.

performing Touch at CCN Nancy, France, Feb 13th

i decided to do this in french because it was important that people understand what i say. i felt hesitant because i had no time to meet with our translator before the show, because he was in rehearsal with the ballet. so i did my own little translation and hoped for the best. realising how the context of performance suddenly makes me want to speak in correct form, to have the right words in the right order, although when i just talk with somebody i'm happy to just be understood.

this made me think of two things,

one: why do i want to be more proper on stage than i actually am?

two: having the task of making myself understood in french completely took away the stress and nervousness i sometimes relate with performing. and this was a very good thing.

i introduced the piece and asked the whole audience to take their shoes off and take a seat in a big circle on the stage. i had some chairs, but there was way too much audience to fit them all on the chairs, and i apologized for that. to my surprise most of them went to sit on the floor, and many of the chairs i had hunted throughout the theatre were left unused. they made a very large circle. i felt relaxed, the whole space changed, and the audience who left their seats became a different kind of social group, they suddenly had connection with each other. i liked that part, it felt very important considering the whole piece, even though i had never thought about it before. i just wanted people in a big circle on the stage. but the action of leaving their seats, taking off their shoes and coming up there created a shared experience and an intimate one between them, which felt like a major part of the piece.

s'il vous plaît, fermez les yeux.

respirez.

mettez votre attention à les sensations sur votre peau.

comment se sent-elle?

qu'est-ce que vous sentez?

les mouvements de l'air?

les materiaux de vos vetements?

vos cheveux?

est-ce qu'il y a les endroits vides, sans sensation?

imaginez, mais faites pas.

imaginez, comment sentirait-il toucher la paume d'une main avec l'autre.

et puis, touchez la paume d'une main avec l'autre.

comment est-ce qu'elles sentent?

cette piece,

je vous invite venir me toucher.

toucher en quelque façon que vous voulez.

s'il vous plaît, dites-moi de m'arrêter, avant que je cours dans quelqu'un, avant qu'il y a une collision,

parce que je ne peux rien voir.

vous puovez aussi dire les autres de s'arrêter, si vous voyez quelque chose qui vous trouvez mauvais.

quand vous voulez voir, pouvez-vous ouvrir les yeux.

i did not use the sound score, the time was too short for it to work. but i sang a song towards the end of the piece, the west coast of finland ballade ...allt under den linden så gröna. i had been singing it during our residency at PAF, and Donna Faye had suggested i use it instead of Quand je serais vieille, because it brought to her the sensation of suspended falling. it worked for me.

i was surprised by the amount of touches, i did not expect so many.

it is a weird study of vulnerability - i feel that even though i am blindfolded and look vulnerable, i am still very much in control of the situation. i am manipulating the space and the audience. they are the ones who feel the discomfort, if nobody comes up to touch me and nothing happens. and they are the ones to feel the responsibility to take care i don't hit things, and the responsibility to stop the action if something feels inappropriate or bad to them. yet they are in a group. they can always wait for someone else to do or say something, but they are also witnessed by each other in that action. how long to wait before acting yourself? maybe the dancer already hit the light tree because everyone waited for someone else to warn her, and everyone is left feeling guilty? yes, i am really manipulating them.

but how far is that from any performance, or, any social situation in life?

what if someone kills herself on stage, when do we stop her?

we feel the responsibility to intervene in things that happen around us, and maybe we wait for someone else to do something, or maybe we choose to convince ourselves that we did not see or hear anything, and negotiate how we deal with the guilt, because of course we saw and we heard. like, how many blocks do i walk in NY until i have to turn back and go check if the homeless person lying on the street is hurt or just sleeping?

brussels

reading "regarding the pain of others" by susan sontag.

thinking about fear, again, thinking about stability, about the illusion of safety in human built environments. on the airplane it is so clear, how small the light dotted cities are in the vastness of the world. and how small the airplane is in the gusts of wind and turbulence that shake it. it is good to know i am small.

thinking about haiti, again. about how good intentions mixed with ignorance can do much harm. how we so much rather act from a place of ignorance, than find out what is really there. reading the news about expedited adoptions from haiti makes me so angry. remembering how the children sent from finland to sweden to be safe from the war suffered from the displacement, and how the trauma of war was doubled by the trauma of being sent away. it became the ruling story of the life of a whole generation, poor children being "saved" by rich, well meaning families who had no idea what was going on.

thinking about falling, and the images of falling.

the dream of the stairwell of one of my childhood apartment buildings falling from under me, leaving just the skeleton of the railings standing in the air, draped with loose debris from the concrete floor that had collapsed. i keep going back to that image, in waking and in dreams. maybe a reason will present itself.

a thesis proposal

Title of Project: Hell Yeah (working title)

Conceptual Framework

I am working on a poetics of pain. Being in a country at war, remembering the physical sensations of fear and threat that I connected to the Cold War, and to sensations and memories from my childhood. How does a constant sense of alarm affect the body? There is an invisible undercurrent of threat and insecurity, which legitimizes violent actions in the long run, but nothing is visible; it is in the air, transparent yet always present. How do we stand to look at other people in pain? The imagery of terror is a male imagery, but there are so many women and everybody knows what happens to them, yet it is still invisible. How do we make choices to distance ourselves or to become involved in their suffering? We tell so many stories. There is mud, and sand, and hair. There is the beauty of breathing, of the moment when the eyes that have been beaten and swollen closed have finally healed enough to crack open, to let a sliver of light in.

"I'd rather be a cyborg than a goddess" - musings on the closing lines of the Cyborg Manifesto by Donna Haraway

When I think of Cyborg, I think of Seria Mau, who refused her destiny as an abused girl child and redefined herself, to become the K-ship whose captain she was. I think of Stephen Hawkins, and what he would have been, had he been born a century earlier. I think of heart valve replacement surgery and the artificial transplants in the heart of my friend. I think of dreams of electric sheep, and imagine possibilities of sensing beyond our bodies. I think of the son who became the God Emperor of Dune by merging his body with that of the sandworm, to save the disappearing desert of Arrakis.

When I think of Goddess, I think of celebrating and honouring the gifts that the Earth offers us. I think of my New Agey friends and their altars in the woods, and how I am irritated by their way of defining Goddess as fitting to their beliefs and needs. I think of maternal clay figures with many breasts, of a matriarchal utopia. I think of my great aunts and their summer paradise, on the beach with women of all ages, shapes and sizes, naked, strong, sun bathing. I think of belonging, I feel the wish to belong, to have a Home.

Then, I think of Zeus giving birth from his head.

And then, I think of Monique Wittig, replying to a rude interviewer that she does not have a vagina.

So much for a foreword. Now for Haraway.

I understand the argument, and I find it appealing. The cyborg’s multiplicity, the refusal of origin and of one truth, seems a necessity in order to overcome the dualist thinking that creates and renews boundaries, hierarchies and a self-reinforcing mechanism of othering. The cyborg, with no loyalty to its creators, suggests a possibility of freedom and survival through fluidity, changing, constantly in the process of re-defining self, and/or balancing on the boundaries of rigid definitions. A home in language, communication, networking, instead of a home in a place, a belief system, a genealogy.

But can we afford to refuse the Goddess, the wisdom of ecological feminist thinking? Does it make sense to let go and burn the bridges leading to ‘origin’ in a flashy post modernist kind of way? (Here I am speaking of origin in an ecological sense.) Could not a cyborgic network of identities leave that bridge standing, too, while building a multiplicity of new ones?

Is it possible to combine the two, to have an open fluid cyborg identity, but to still honour the dust or the minerals that we are constructed of? To piss on the Father’s (Mother’s) shoes, but still acknowledge that we are related?

In other words: does metaphysics have to be anti-science? (page 28) Isn’t that just another dualism that the cyborg image can question and re-define?

I believe we need metaphysics.

We need it to feel the meaning of our actions, not just see the consequences. We need something to believe in: not to flock to one Truth like sheep, but to have a reason to keep living. I believe that if we want to stop raping and abusing the planet we live in, on, and of, we need to acknowledge what we owe to it.

Maybe love is the last stronghold of metaphysics, or maybe it is art.

And maybe art, or love, can open a possibility to imagine a fusion of the two, an ecological cyborg, not of the Family of Man, but bound by love to the minerals she is constructed from.