(XXX)
PERFORMANCE SPACE, FUSEBOX AND SYDNEY CONTEMPORARY PRESENT
“I do have a tongue
that wants to speak
in the language of cultural desire […]
I want so much more” – Ellen van Neerven, Throat
“Funny how an Indian ‘I love you’ sounds more like ‘I am in pain with you’,” – Joshua Whitehead, Jonny Appleseed
Broadcast online at sunset each day, this performance ritual centres a daily exchange of love letters between Koori artist and writer SJ Norman and Cherokee writer and scholar Joseph M Pierce. Writing from their respective quarantines in Sydney and New York, each artist will read the other’s letter direct-to-camera as the sun sets over their city, every day of Liveworks.
On Demand Check out the @DecolonialLoveLetters instagram handle below
Duration Between 10 to 30 minutes
Cost Free, registration required
Warnings This performance contains strong language and sexual references
(XXX) proposes a queered, decolonial inhabitation of the epistolary form—an artefact of the Western literary canon—as a space through which to trace the remote entanglement of two Indigenous people in creative, intimate, and embodied kinship. Invoking the violence of separation and the erotic poiesis of distance, Norman and Pierce consider what it means to express Indigenous love in the colonisers’ language. (XXX) continues a body of work by SJ Norman that maps a vast and growing network of queer, First Nations inter-connectedness spanning continents, cultures, and ancestral temporalities.
Speaking to the current disruption of transnational relationships and cultural ties that are a consequence of the current global pandemic, and exploring new forms for the exchange of First Nations knowledge and the strengthening of bonds, (XXX) bridges the intimate with the epic.
(XXX) was commissioned by Performance Space and Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.
