Thresholding: to the limit of an arrival

Video, 11’57”

Video and Performance
Aeroponic Act, July, 2022
Dutch Art Institute, Centrale Fies,
Dro, Italy.

Video editing: Maoyi Qiu
Sound desgin & composition: Maoyi Qiu
Voice: Nataly Ba

Performance:
Ros del Olmo
Derek Di Fabio
Izaro Ieregi Gonzalez
Maoyi Qiu

Visual documentation:
Baha Görkem Yalım
Clara Winter

The work was realized in the form of live performance with video and sound elements. The video documentation of the work is partly edited into and extended the video work.

A body that aches and acts up creates lines of flight in the space between departure and arrival, a non-graspable experience of transition. It is in a way a panoptical stance in itself, creating a position of observation for the being or beings thrust into this vulnerable state. The space made up of the incoherent speech opens up to us in a deft disorienting move, bringing forth a body making felt the shape of constraint. The body is attending to the laborious costs of not being in just one place or the other at any given fucking moment in time.

Through the lens of queer practico-political perspectives, “Thresholding: to the limit of an arrival“ is a poetic relation to the question of the body to be integrated into a new space and/or to be contained--through which bodies are constituted, positioned, and lived – is ironically dependent on its enfleshment as already exists in its real aches, pain, and incoherence.

The video work creates an inverted interface, where the eyes must be free, seeing which often through the surveillance camera does to the self, where the screen of the map not only comes with the geographical attention but also the geographical sensibility - “The screen is looking at you, and capturing your movement, keeps following you around.”

The movements are framed, seemingly captured, the fractures of falling for memories, in which we are not able to fully get away with.

At times of exiles, at times of hostiles, the performance delayed and overlapped the imaginaries being caught up by question of representation, the victimhood of technological control, and the jarring reality of visibility as a trap to the livelihood of surveillance refugees. What mechanisms of visibility do to ourselves to the legible, legitimate beings? It opens the discussion of the poorest nature of the boundaries of sociality that we are trying to push up against, to reach outside of that technological gaze. Here, the sociality of the subculture, the fuzziness of experience, the intimate conversations that are overheard by the audience. It suggests us to not reach for the large actions, but to the almost dismissible gestures which bring us liberation and a visibility towards to oneself, that outside of the engine of state power, economic exclusion and masculinity.

At the same time, it is posing the problematic to the radicalization of the arrivals, and the pain of arriving, and belonging, being taken apart.

What does it means to claim place? One of the retrieving to the self is by spontaneously poetic vision. The text is written in an attempt to create belonging that can be found through a poetic reconstruction.

Arrival let us to forget to take in account the differentialization that acquires to claim and to belong, and to the kinds of elimination and forgetting. Relationalities are brought possible because of imperial colonial practices. Those who are forced to arrive, as a result from both American and European violence that has made the arrival necessarily. At the same time compound the violence when arrival comes.