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(2)On Withdrawal
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Exhibited as part of the Consumed exhibition at ArtHouse Jersey, The Women’s Research Wānanga.
Making this work has and is, taking a long time. To date, I have been making On Withdrawal since September 2024. I consider this version another iteration of an ongoing enquiry into my body, socio-economic systems and ideas of inequity and physical, affective, embodied acts of defiance and refusal.
It all started when I bought a body suit with no face hole; a kind of second skin that engulfed me. I liked how it felt as if I was both invisible yet hyper visible, and very, very slippery. When I zipped my face, body and limbs into this cheap Black Lycra suit, no one could see my face, yet this second skin traced and contained my body, turning me into an unheimlich silhouette.
Like most things, this expression, and impulse to buy my shadow suit was rooted in a deep round of psychological and physical processing. When I started developing this part of myself, that I have come to call my shadow killjoy, it was early October 2024.
I was working full time as a researcher at Cambridge University, working predominantly from home, and had just gone through major and sudden Ovarian cancer tests, followed by rapid surgery. I was also at the start of an intense, beguiling, enriching and simultaneously damaging relationship. Who wouldn’t want to dress up in a body stocking to become a haunting, defiant, fuck you, silhouette.
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HAPPY BIG MASSIVE FULL MOON // On Withdrawal ROUND TWO
“Who are you. Who are you. Who are you. Stop, language is crawling all over me. Sometimes if you stay still long enough you can make it go.” Emily Berry, 2017
Three ways to withdraw (from the f****** hetero patriarchal capitalist death trap) Round TWO.
On Withdrawal is currently on show as part of the Consumed Exhibition Arthouse Jersey. It has been a year in the making, and I'm not sure it's finished yet...On withdrawal is a 12-minute-long performance-film, written, performed, staged, and shot in the tradition of DIY feminist performance art.
That is, I used resources I had freely available to me to make this work. The purpose of the work is to at once parody and critique the systemic inequities of Eurocentric, hetero-patriarchal, late capitalism. The system that places great pressures, inequities, and injustices on many bodies; though not all bodies will experience the same combination of pressures, inequalities, and stress fractures (Berlant, 2011; Crenshaw, 1989). Some are hurt & hurt way more than others.
Through the filmic narrative and performance, I suggest three methods of withdrawal. Three ways to tap out of and at once disrupt exploitative and precarious working conditions; gendered microaggressions that so often see female identifying people named as difficult, demanding or stress-heads (Ahmed, 2017); and practical, hands on methods for cathartic release (aka cake smashing) from the exhaustion, chronic stress, sleeplessness and fatigue that comes from living entangled and harmed / trapped by the values, politics and economics of racist, transphobic, misogynistic shitty late capitalism (Fisher, 2009)
References
Ahmed, S. (2017) Living a feminist life. Durham: Duke University Press.
Berlant, L. G. (2011) Cruel optimism. Durham, N.C: Duke University Press.
Crenshaw, K. W. (2011) ‘Demarginalising the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Anti-discrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Anti-racist Politics 1’, in Maria Teresa Herrera Vivar et al. (eds.) Framing Intersectionality. 1st edition [Online]. Routledge. pp. 25–42.
Fisher, M. (2009) Capitalist realism : is there no alternative? Winchester: O Books.
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