Still to come.
This text was written in relation to a performance entitled Still to come (A feminist pornscape). Thanks to NONA Residency, Sarajevo for hosting and to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb for housing me whilst writing.
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Still to come
Accompaniment to reading: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYWsZ4TtIt0
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I don’t know how to count this one…
Conjure your lust from the banal. Find yourself mirrored in the proposition of lit snaking ropes, unused. You think of your brother’s box of pulled tape ribbon, of dipping in deep, up to your elbow, swallowing your arm, as they describe the muscles of anuses learning to open wide, learning to return. A small pucker. Needles of cacti calling the hairs across your skin to alert. The knife blade of your forearm is now a weapon, the clit on your back screaming for a re-do: that moment her hand covered yours and you pulled away, terrified of sparks. Get out of here, get closer. I could cry salty tears, where have I been all these years?
Nipples flop repeatedly, pointing at the crowd, each particular. What strange creatures humans are. Almost as strange as boyfriends, as bras, as this small platter you’re served to select your sexuality from. Nice but narrow. No one mentioned tree bark or rotting moss or the moment bone becomes metal.
Birds twitching and rigid. Some thrills I can’t define.
“I want my skin to be doubled and then punctured, slowly.” “Sure, I’ll do that for you.”
Witnessing you feel it, witnessing you feel it, we are witnessing you feel it.
Whose body?
Oh, that’s your sexuality right now?
Little wow, tell me how, how uncommon to my eyes, to my senses, tell me more. Confuse me, I adore confusion (I strive to). I want to be where I don’t understand. Where I can’t describe what it is before it is. Where I don’t know how this unfolds starting with kissing and ending with – break my ideas of cocks and cunts and fingers and lips. Let’s let our shoulders morph into green leaves and our toes become thick tongues and wonder oh wonderful, what will you make my body become next?
There’s no climax but there’s peaks and valleys: we are here for the long haul. #insertlesbianjokehere
I don’t want you to fuck my brains out, I want you to show me the bridge where my brain becomes a dick tip bulging and the shore line licks, tide coming in. Where my brain becomes a vein, feeling only pulsing blood. Where the foam on the waves alights and is our neuropathways and we are turquoise and nothing.
A fist full of lotion and a Morana-white egg become all I’ve ever wanted. (When I describe the eggs, carefully held in warm slippery palms, over the phone later I’m met with a soft sigh. Everyone gets it.) Mentos clicking against many sets of sharp teeth. Oh I feel that I could melt… I’m hurled. Hanging halfway out a window while you trace the outline of my foot on brick with your fingers that have become chalk. Fuck me powder blue and shadowed. Fuck me which is your head and mine becoming linked by plastic wrap across the room and we turn, slowly reeling in towards each other, an unstoppable slow boat crash, reminding me of Red Bind in Chandigarh. How long has this been going on?
You want your skin to turn blushed and bright from scratching yourself, that makes you hot, that’s what you want? In my scrambling blunders, I want to know. I will say yes to all I can say yes to. I will honour whatever I can’t meet. I will never shame you for wanting a crow to caw into your cunt. Your kinks are your medicine. Your kinks are your medicine. Your kinks are your medicine.
Dancing at a party, hands slimy and dripping to our elbows. A soft dangling touch as white alien fingers flicker across feet. Turtle-shelled, a completely hidden body, its opacity what’s visible. Like a slug, like a stone. Don’t wake me if I’m asleep. I catch a whiff of a geography in which I can’t be touched, so I’m safe. Let me dream that it’s true. My spine is stacked metal prisons, swaying, padlocks clanking. The melancholy was a refusal to embrace what you showed me: I don’t want to be alone anymore. I am alone.
The parts of a body that I don’t know how to name. That little spot. That thing that is just what it is and is not a limb, not a book, not a knowable place, it’s only you. I don’t have the words because all I have are the words we’ve been given. Make it for me, show me what you want before wanting is only capitalism, is only white supremacy, is only patriarchy, is only conquest and domination and cum shots and fluffers and this is how a body looks. This is what a body does.
Let’s undo bodies together.
Butt cheek huddle high five. A team without winning ambitions. Finding another world.
Make your pornscape and I’ll make mine. From before this boring selection we are left with, cold and limp and lackluster. From before desire was organized.
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Still to come (A feminist pornscape) credits:
Presented at the Queer Zagreb Festival, May 2018. Concept and choreography: Rahel Barra, Ida Daniel, Ana Dubljević, Frida Laux, Zrinka Užbinec Performance: Rahel Barra, Ida Daniel, Ana Dubljević, Zrinka Užbinec Lights and stage: Carina Premer Costumes: Silvio Vujičić Photo and video documentation: Julia Novacek Production: Marijana Cvetković
For more about the show see: https://adubljevic.wordpress.com/portfolio/still-to-come-a-feminist-pornscape/