Hand to Mouth: DE-SUICIDE
PS122 GALLERY
October 21–November 21, 2021
150 First Avenue New York, NY 10009
DE-SUICIDE is a multichannel video installation and sculptural environment. The video and objects in the installation are the result of a yearlong process of workshops with dancers Tushrik Fredericks (Johannesburg/NY, Margaux Marielle-Trehoüart (Berlin), Laura K. Nicoll (NY), and Effie Bowen (NY); musician JD Samson (NY); guest dramaturgs Patricia Hernandez (NY) and Bronwyn Lace (Johannesburg/Vienna); and partnerships with Summer Guthery of JOAN Los Angeles and Ian Cofre of PS122 Gallery.
Working interdisciplinarily between sculpture, moving images, and dance, DE-SUICIDEy is an attempt to find a more egalitarian system for balancing the hierarchy between humans and nonhumans. Physical objects, materials, and gadgets are not just instruments or props but equal partners, inanimate collaborators forming a coalition with human performers and encountering the risks, damages, and potentials of their environment. To DE-SUICIDE is to become WITH rather than to follow our settler-colonial histories and claim ownership of resources, people, and land. Being WITH, rather than owning and dominating, is to follow the sculptural sensibility of crafting materials into objects. Whether in the studio, backstage, or in a dance video, bodies and objects hybridize in the act of cohabiting the scene. Picking its cues from the two channels edited videos in the installation, the accuracy provided by the timecode patch in Isadora and DMX controllers allowed for a precise sequence of kinetic and light cues programmed in unison between the installation’s atmosphere and its video content
The symbolic meaning of the phrase “hand to mouth” and its reflection on materialistic hardship sheds light on the distance between one’s mouth and hand, establishing limits of perspective. Anything beyond these physical and metaphorical ranges is considered unrealistic or fantastical. When accessibility becomes the measure of availability, Hand to Mouth asks: how does this rehearsed, limited engagement with a world of deficiency and self-deprivation restrict our non-materialistic experiences? Can we meditate on our artistic responsibilities and possibilities outside of the pre-existing disciplines, formats, and structures of distribution and consumption of materials and resources? Can our aspirations, motivations, desires, and hopes transcend what is physically and spiritually available to us?
To DE-SUICIDE is to become with, rather than following our settler-colonial histories to claim ownership of resources, people, and land. DE-SUICIDE is local, manifested through repetition of singular gestures which are performed until it leaks into the abyss of soil. It removes the option to own, to master, to control, and allows the emergence of other relationships, or, at the very least, it brings to the fore the relationships that may have existed before the master's hand took hold. With each move, we view the human as another node within the network and learn to live alongside difference. In order to do this, we remove ourselves from the center.
99.999999999% of relations in the cosmos are not human related.
Self-care is cute,
and selfish,
Do you care for something else?
Thanks to residency support from KinoSaito we were able to make a live performance version of DE-SUICIDE
handtomouth.wtf
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handtomouth.wtf 〰️
SITE
full moon midnight of October 1, 2020
Glue only knows eternity and it takes forever to dry.
Once dry, eternity ends
BACKSTAGE
Full moon midnight of September 2, 2020
Nobody cares, until somebody does, and then it's their problem