DUST-GAG-PUKE-GOSSIP
DUST-GAG-PUKE-GOSSIP (2019) worships the political potential of chosen family, affective comradeship and subterranean communities. It weaves different methods of knowledge-sharing through text into each other by formally distinguishing two voices: (1) an embodied voice appealing to the imaginative and (2) a theoretical voice.
The text’s embodied voice uses ‘dust’, ‘gagging’ and ‘puking’ as central concepts. ‘Dust’ draws upon systems of exclusion and oppression: omnipresent structures that certain bodies fail to digest and to which convulsion might be a response. ‘Gagging’, then, is positioned a physical and political obstruction as well as potentiality: an uncomfortable outcome of inhaling dust – the body resisting normative systems – possibly leading to puking. ‘Puking’ or ‘vomiting’ here serves as liberating act: producing liquid that is both the product of the world’s toxic systems as well as an entirely new mush that contains alternate tastes and ingredients in respect to what had been taken in. In vomit thus resides the potential to transgress modes of negation and to produce entirely new ‘blends’, forms and relations. In their connectedness, the central concepts under the text’s embodied voice aim to work through modes of disidentification toward embracing the failure to conform as strength, producing alternate and healing modes of being (together) in community.
The theoretical voice of DUST-GAG-PUKE-GOSSIP elaborates on historical and socio-political theories that position the silencing of certain bodies as oppressive tools. Moreover, the theoretical voice shows damaging influences of patriarchy and capitalism on the word ‘gossip’ and draws upon transgressive and powerful potentialities in speaking together under oppressive systems. The theoretical voice synthesizes with the embodied voice in the concept of ‘gossip’. Both voices offer causes to reclaim ‘gossip’s’ caring potential. Both voices merge in ‘gossip’ as a political act of healing within chosen family-bonds, affective comradeship and subterranean communities.
GAGGING GOSSIPS
GAGGING GOSSIPS (2019) is a published text and sound piece that emerged from DUST-GAG-PUKE-GOSSIP. The sound piece whispers part of the text as published in A Friend of a Friend on top of low-frequency sine waves that beat into each other. The sine waves’ frequencies are adjusted to the resonance frequency of the space. This is when the space starts vibrating. It can be unpleasant to be around such beating waves because they trigger nausea and disorienting sensations. Besides whispered text and beating sine waves, GAGGING GOSSIPS also layers sounds of gagging and, eventually, vomiting in its composition. The sound piece has been performed at Sandberg Institute and Fanfare, Amsterdam [NL]. The image on the right shows the audience setup at Sandberg Institute. The circle is surrounded by speakers and subwoofers.
A Friend of a Friend can be purchased at San Seriffe Art Book Shop in Amsterdam.
