ecologies of practice, place and body
Slow, immanent, seeping permeation of relation with place and each other (whisper, ripple, shimmer, rumble); nourished by deep listening and field work.
[I confide in your texture]
Soundcloud
Vimeo
ecologies of practice, place and body
Slow, immanent, seeping permeation of relation with place and each other (whisper, ripple, shimmer, rumble); nourished by deep listening and field work.
[I confide in your texture]
Soundcloud
Vimeo
Wurundjeri Biik: ‘Flemington Bridge Station’ area
Body giving over its resources; the concrete terrain is open and coated in a layer of bacteria-rich silt. Channel / Canal. We want to get close to it, want to know - viscosity, tone, texture, composition. Leaping and bleeding, spitting into the water as greeting, as a way of saying hello this is us, here is our water, into your water, are we both contaminated? Co-contaminating? “When we pee antihistamines into waterways, the ‘distributed agency’ of those drugs on hydroecologies, on riparian flora and fauna, and on weather systems, drips from our bodies, too.”1
Making art of my bleeding in a collaborative act of nurturance and sharing my body with the earth feels startingly poignant. I am the wombless, sexless, dual-sexed cavern of a woman; ever debated, ever liminal, ever excluded from dialogues of the sacred feminine. Rituals pertaining to women’s bleeding have ever been deified in ritual: cycles of bleeding tied to the moon, to fertility, to life bringing. In my few years I have lost more pints of blood than most women will in their entire lives; at my own feeble behest (that however can be debated).
It would be a fallacy to pretend I don’t mourn an inclusion in these (albeit fetishistic and biologically essentialist) rituals of womanhood. I remember being a child and listening, heartbroken, as my mother told my sister how her body was connected to the earth, her period was connected to the moon and the oceans, and was a sacred symbolisation of her womanhood. No one has ever told me my womanhood was sacred.
But today I bled into the waterways where I have lived for years. Companions washed my perpetually battered feet with such compassion, I bled into the primordial bodies of water. Is this blood of mine sacred too? Does this blood of mine signify my own power to nurture as well? Am I a goddess too? Am I sacred too? Today I felt perhaps my body was sacred. I wonder what it feels like to have always felt that way…
We wash her foot, water mixes with blood into water turbid and heavy.
We share our water with the water. The sweat, saliva, blood, we are bodies in common. The water is gestating - new life, new ecologies, bacteria that thrive in anaerobic water, how we lean into intercorporeality; --
A failed leap across the creek; the channel that funnels the waste water, it wants to slow here and spread. It is wider, ready for the heavy rains and flooding. She has seen it flooding before, the memory is present, she knows herself and knows she will heal quickly. We may be concerned and it may seem distressing. But she is capable and resilient.
1. Astrida Neimanis, Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), 17.