Things built under pressure.

Bodies built for repetition, delicate magnetic ribbons, wind around this mortal coil, everything returns to soil. - musical text from Graveyards & Gardens, by Caroline Shaw and Vanessa Goodman with Sound Design by Eric Chad and Kate DeGorme 

I am putting this here to understand it, to process how it all intersects later, over time…

I am in the middle of a Disco music binge. I think as a musical form, it is the one with the most sex woven into it, intrinsic to it. Part of that, but not all, is its unrelenting rhythm. Its drive towards the next peak, which is neverending (or we could imagine that to be true.) 

I am also filming Primordial. It’s really hot. I put the blankets on, and it is COMPLETELY dark. I remember Taylor’s question from the March artist talk about if this focus on feeling and interiority makes it hard to be present to my environment, to connect (that’s my memory of the question at least.) I had been talking about the vividness of the ice floor when doing Primordial on a frozen lake and that it was like being on a glowing light box, an overwhelming, hidden space just for me (for now - we want to film it). But now, doing it in hot Philly foliage, on dirt, I put the blankets on and the sun gradually filters out, until it’s just dark. All I can hear is my breath, and I can’t see anything. I had told Taylor that Primordial wants to project interior feeling OUT, to extend how far it can go, so no, the loudness of what is maybe a private experience pressing forward, outward doesn’t disconnect, it urges towards connection - hope for it? And Primordial wants that divide, or rupture or failure of translation - as a practice and art object it wants the lushness of the doer’s experience pressed right up against something starkly visual. (It’s a somatic, sculptural practice translated into a video.) It wants the gap of translation, between the feeling and the form. Understanding is about perspective, and with multiple viewpoints (mine from inside the blankets and your’s from outside), we will never fully align understanding. But we can meet in the fuzzy space of approach, rich with intent and curiosity. 

Sylvan says, “Foley identifies a false, but no less felt, binary then offers healing union.”

I found this writing from a year ago about Primordial:
I want to do drag as a fabric rock, as a boulder made out of fabric. I want to encase myself in fabric and be something other at the same time that I feel closer to myself, closer to an unknowing, a lack of articulation. 
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Primordial was the first translation of queer motherhood into performance. A performative articulation of Edouard Glissant’s work. It is the starting place. I cover myself, trace myself with fabric, match my own edges, and obscure myself. I become enmeshed and then I move around. I want to put my body - my constructed boulder in conjunction and in contrast with a range of environments: subway platforms, meadows, frozen lakes, forests. - other rocks, other lineages, other growths. 

Gestation. Heat. Rocks. (Disco.)