Institutional Care and the Feminine Aquatic.

I set out to relate the specific research into Dundee as a waterfront and how the aquatic has played a particularly materially prominent role in the city’s political history to the performing body. I considered what it would mean for me to speak this political-manifesto language to an audience in the present, as a singular female body. I was then thinking in a more materially abstract sense about Water, the different stages that the body might go through aquatically, as the female body aged. Whilst I was developing this performance, I read a post-human rereading of Luce Irigaray by Astrida Neimanis:. “For Irigaray, feminine bodies are fluid, both figuratively in their non-subsumability into a masculine paradigm, and literally in their genital mucosity, their placental interchanges, and their amniotic flows. This leakiness is what makes woman always a woman-to-come” (78). This interpretation proffers the opposite of the essentialist readings of fixed gender, which are often levelled against Irigaray. This sense of fluidity, as a characteristic of the feminine in itself, and the idea of leaking, as the feminine being able to seep through evading capture, shifted how I wanted to use that initial research into the architecture of Aquatic Needs. The aquatic was abstracted onto my body as the performer, and then the question was how to imbibe the sense of the substance onto the political language, taking Irigaray as a model, both figuratively and literally.

A framework was thus shaped in which the watery female body (me, the performer) would embody the forty-year-old neoliberal state. The performance would echo a trajectory of mucosity; the 1980s/90s – toilet trained, periods; the 2000s – abortion, periods; the 2020s – children, incontinence, no periods. I used language from female public health literature and combined it with the political speech of manifestoes so that the performance script would also reflect the implicated ideological transformations. The shifts in power emerge somewhat intuitively through the amalgamation of different languages and the way they form an address to the audience. The instructional aspect of the public health advice takes an authoritative tone, but also translates into actions which I perform, making the bodily text refer to my body, and undermining that authority, as I become vulnerable and dependent. (See also the opening question.) In combination with the declamatory style of the manifestoes, the performance rhetoric sounds almost like a personal mantra that has turned intersubjective and points to collective self-care.

By testing the audience with rhetorical questions but also letting them off, I aim to maintain a balance, whereby I have the power as the performer but I’m also the figure of ridicule. I speak directly to the audience as if they are participants or as if they should join me in my actions, even though, ultimately, they remain an audience. In a sense it is the playing out of the theatre of participative democracy.

The dates on the clothes operate as literal footnotes on the body, indicating the time period that the script refers to. They were intended as visual signs that illustrate the shifts between the design cultures of different periods; the fonts and swimming symbols are taken from the Olympic Games of those years: the first one –‘1980’ (Moscow) – is late Soviet; the gestural and lively ‘2000’ is for Barcelona; and, obviously, the lean, slick ‘2020’ would have been Tokyo. . With this I was exploring how ideological shifts were visible in that design and how the aesthetic and chronological space between the dates might represent the progression of neoliberalism.

In addition, I wanted the way I moved my body or indicated with my body to be determined by their position. So, they also functioned as props, giving a key into the the particular period that the script referenced.. The ‘1980’ was placed on my arm as I gestured to people to move out of the symposium space; the ‘2020’ on my crotch meant I rolled in on myself as I urinated through the text about incontinence. The future date stamped across the female crotch was also intended to be funny, a sort of feminist performance joke.

So the question would be is Irigaray’s woman-to-come speculative? I think seen in conjunction with its literal counterpart of the female health literature there is something which shows the feminine aquatic is a different kind of flow to the speculative circulation of late capitalism an abject non-productive flow, like the wasted leak in the performance.

These artistic-political discussions about individual subjectivity and how the state has de-collectivised our psychology (neoliberal political rhetoric), when seen through theories of the feminine and gendered institutional language (female public health), should speak about the biopolitical seepage which burdens the clean flow of capital. My work in general is a camp over-identification with these seepages; pointing to how, ultimately, the system we live under is unfeasible. Care is difficult, or the infrastructure of care we have makes it difficult. Shifting language that is used by the state at a macro level and towards the female body, to an audience interaction at the scale of performance is simply about seeing what happens: how those specific conditions of collectivity possible within a live performance play out in a utopian environment where history can collapse and be tested.