Is it possible to queer space?
Can queerness be made visible?
What is queer space?
This Cloud Is experiments with the proposition
of queering space through somatic practice, performance, sound, mapping,
light, moving image and cardboard structures.
As the culminating event for the 2016 Caroline Plummer Fellowship in Community Dance, This Cloud Is, in partnership with Urban Dream Brokerage, occupied George Street’s Under Market in Dunedin for a 2-week participatory residency and performance installation event.
As the culminating event for the 2016 Caroline Plummer Fellowship in Community Dance, This Cloud Is, in partnership with Urban Dream Brokerage, occupied George Street’s Under Market in Dunedin for a 2-week participatory residency and performance installation event.
The 6-month fellowship project THIS CLOUD IS QUEERING! explored a process of mapping queer, trans and cis experiences of public spaces around Dunedin. Engaging local rainbow communities and our friends, the project invited participation in one-on-one walks,
conversations, community building experiments, workshops, studio
research, site-based tests and somatic performance methodologies.
In collaboration with local performers, artists, and community participants, the performance installation event This Cloud Is featured eleven stations that invited attendees into intimate queer encounters. Stations were designed by project participants in conversation with myself as event curator. Additionally, sound artist Eves returned to Otepoti from Melbourne to perform live inside the Under Market's defunct gas heating chamber (which was really awesome). Our starting point for creating these encounters, and the cardboard structures which housed these encounters, was a shared studio process that focused on the experience of touch, listening through touch, holding, and other textures of connection. We also experimented with our embodied relationship to the space itself as an alive environment, and collaborator in the art and art-making process.
I contributed two stations to the event - Introverts Party and HOLY SHIT. Introverts Party offered a room filled with variously sized dark spaces, where you could choose to interact with other party-goers, or simply have some private, quiet time alone/not alone (with mirror ball wonderment). HOLY SHIT is comprised of five fully functional gender-inclusive composting toilets, imbued with a hauntological approach to experiences of queer sound and faggot lights. Developed in consultation with artist Leyton Glen, and constructed by sculptor, Katrina Thomson, the toilets attempt an ethical recreation of gay clubs that you and I may, or may not have, visited in person but of which we are all quantum physically entangled into. In particular, they invite a conversation with LGBTQI folks who have died at the hands of homophobia or transphobia.
Performance installation: 7.30pm Sunday June 19th.
#mapping #queerfeelings #queerephemera #queerspace #queerchoreography #thiscloudis
Acknowledgements:
Caroline Plummer Fellowship in Community Dance
Dance Studies, School of Physical Education Sport and Exercise Sciences, Otago University
Urban Dream Brokerage.
Katrina Thomson
Leyton Glen
Photos Justin Spiers
