I’m irritated by stories which suggest ruination or demand total recovery. When I look at myself, I see someone sitting at the crossroads; perpetually.

SECOND FLOOR

The second floor explores the erotic, the dovetailing of fiction and research, and the power of personal narrative.

In one room, the audience was invited to dig through an antique box of explicit sexual content created during a time where I was desperately trying to redefine my own erotic image, especially as a queer woman who is chronically ill and forever pulling myself out of the physical damage endured from a lifetime of anorectic behavior. The photographs, titled “After Fuses” in homage to Carolee Schneemann’s landmark video Fuses, were accompanied by my essay “Silver Tableaux: Memoir Vivant.” Surrounding this content were books on anorexia, memoir, and auto theoretical image production. Two performers resided in this bedroom, posed across the large antique bed. The queer couple were awash in fuchsia light, alternating between turning their bedside light on and off. When sitting upright, their light was on, while their partner rested beside them, reaching for their partner.

The other room took on a different tone. Dominant in this room was literature that had inspired much of the aesthetics, tone, and flavor of my writing. This room featured a printed copy of the lesbian romance novel that I publish online for young queer femmes and sapphics. This novel was being released, chapter by chapter, in tandem with the images in the antique box over the course of 2022 and 2023. Writing the novel began on my 2022 pilgrimage to London; where I vowed to begin again, start over, after a very dark time. The two performers in this room alternate between reading to one another, sitting upon the other, and traveling up and down the stairs; locked into each other.

Between these bedrooms is a landing, where traveling performers created mobile vignettes. This space was sonically punctuated by the singing in the stairwell, the voices of those reading, and the utterances of the traveling performers.

+First Bedroom +

+ Landing +

+ Second Bedroom +

First Bedroom

Take a minute to write an introduction that is short, sweet, and to the point. If you sell something, use this space to describe it in detail and tell us why we should make a purchase. Tap into your creativity. You’ve got this.

Read Essay Here

“What I am interested in is staring at that image before me and asking what is that? And why? If some form of comfort or “healing” comes from developing a deeper understanding as to why starvation feels like an appropriate response to exterior threats, then I am thankful. If understanding leads to new ways of operating in the world, alleviating suffering, then I feel blessed. Yet, through taking images of myself and committing to a memoir-practice and studying well-known micro-celebrities and memoirists who have become symbols of the unrecoverable and the bountiful gift of recovery, I have come to a place of frustration. I ask, especially within this memoir practice, what about sitting firmly within one’s current state, knowing that fully emerging out of “illness” or recovering from bodily disruption isn’t possible? What about refuting the ableist construct that in order to live a full life, one that is imbued with desire, pleasure, joy, and want, one must be completely “healed” or better first? There is value in writing from and generating understanding right where one currently is; “healthy” or not.”

Excerpt from “Silver Tableaux: Memoir Vivant”