Concept: Xenia Taniko, Roni Katz

Performance: Xenia Taniko, Eleanor Ivory Weber, Elena Betros, Roni Katz

In collaboration with: Thomas Proksch

 

2016 / Volksroom Brussels

 

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We invited ourselves to a new city, then we invited others. We are hosting hosted. And here is where we insist. On the impossibility, the inappropriate and impertinent. This is an attempt. This is a rehearsal. A rehearsal of (all) sorts, to endlessly prepare for the inevitable. Since inevitably, boundaries are made to be crossed. 

We could say that these practices are like the question-exclamation-marks, commas and period, the Doppelpunkt of our lives, addressing our work, and the world we inhabit. We ask ourselves and one another: What are the borderlines between our public and and our private, friend and lover, leisure and labor, between work, life and art? If we are at work all the time, what do we labor for? What about the nonproductive labor that happens in the most private parts of our life, shed away from the public, performed in households, bedrooms, kitchens, bathrooms. The kind of labor that one performs with oneself, or next to another. What happens when that private and invisible, secret thing is performed publicly? How can being publicly intimate be an act of caring for oneself in a community-constituting way? Who says where this belongs, and what is longed to be public? When practicing public intimacy, we slide through the confessional, the biographical, the social, the political, the paradoxical, the poetic. In the poetry of the paradox lies a radical intimacy with one’s own body, producing queer satisfaction on its own terms, making way for friction and conflict, fantasies, healing, shame, self-pleasuring, rage, panic, madness, obsessions, desires.

Is this labor, this language, leading anywhere?