About

In this practice as research, I examine ways performance can be-with injury of contemporary war. Here, I offer the maritime metaphor of the doldrums  as a method and framing device for a witnessing that is historical.  Injury is explained through a type of suspension -a delay of listening and responding to the painful conditions of others. I translocate the metaphor of the doldrums into my performance practice to become feminist and decolonising, interpreting it from its former position of stuckness to an active mode of listening to this delay.  I draw from post-colonial theorist Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics (2019) -a ‘live and let die’ attitude of sovereignty applied to victims of contemporary war. I argue for a feminist practice of diffraction after Karan Barad as a way of cutting into binaries. I also argue for what I term quieter methods; these are silence, contemplation, performative text and cutting/diffraction. Quieter methods move away from graphic images typically associated with witnessing contemporary war injury, choosing instead banal, white capitalist landscapes. I build my practice of quiet, following in the lineage of women artists and critical theorists; Lauren Berlant, Della Pollock, Tina Campt, Nadia Seremetakis, who enrich my own understanding of witnessing through a deeper listening to the ordinary day-to-day. I further follow in Chris Cuomo’s (1996) notion of war as omnipresence, David Bissels (2006) being-with and Walter Benjamin's (1940) clock time to theorise an aesthetic of the doldrums. In my creative works I see myself as a passenger practitioner, outside of the traditional artist’s studio, passing through places of devestation where other voices and histories rise and become witnessed through the performance practice.