tO liVE, we dIED

The performance borrowed from the struggles and survival of trans-black-bodies, inspired and provoked by the rituals of visiting the ocean each day and night while communicating with those chained rocks. Collecting memories of personal experiences into artistic object, the performance invites the audience to question their own vulnerabilities, fears, mortality and privileges. It leads the viewer to contemplate on the body as a provocative material navigating hazards and risks. In this performance I installed the bidet in which I washed my face in the mud and ate junk of muds, a symbolic gesture of unpleasant healing, ‘dying to live’, the baptismal and rebirth. By penetrating my choky-mouth down to the throat I attempt to draw attention to both physical and psychological death suffered by marginalized people, that which they may have to suffer to survive. We can not in this presentation ignore the body in question, the black body, the trans body, and an African body all again on the coast, dying and battling to survive. I wanted my audience to experience the emotional encounter, ‘awakening shocks’, and reflect on the lines between life and death while imagining their own stories and recreating their own narratives. In other words, finding the point at which the body and its political representation blurs, dissolves and disappears leaving just the bare life.