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WHAT is it?

We are the Landscape, is a performance featuring myself and eight women who lived and worked in a building in London from which we were to be evicted. It is a 20 minute performance, opening and closing with the women performing an act of a meditative group hum. During the performance the group of women act out monotonous poses in the form of a tableaux vivant whilst whispering and shouting out perscribed prose woven in with improvised dialogues. We are the Landscape has dystopian science fiction qualities to it the performers move around the audience wearing costumes made out of symbols found on the QWERTY keyboard, smoke e cigarettes and wrap themselves in hydrothermal blankets whilst speaking multiple languages.

HOW was it made? The work was made through a series of conversations that formed organically in the garden of the building; surrounding topics of action, protest and choice. Certain structures were then put into place to explore the potentials for creating a group consciousness that could lead to something, and the work was about how this could then be potentially represented.

WHY did you make it?

The work was made crucially as a response to the news of the eviction from the building. The work aimed to explore the precariousness of many young women's live/work situations and aims to critique London's neo-liberal environment, and the gentrification of the city. I believe we are entrenched in a deeply surreal and dystopic reality, but have grown so accustomed to it that we no longer even notice. My intention, in part, was to defamiliarize the environment, in order to make evident what is already present. I was interested in depicting and portraying everyday science fictions, because as J.G.Ballard writes; "Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century."

[S: this is what happens when you get rid of the headings]

''We are the Landscape, is a performance featuring myself and eight women who lived and worked in a building in London from which we were to be evicted. It is a 20 minute performance, opening and closing with the women performing an act of a meditative group hum. During the performance the group of women act out monotonous poses in the form of a tableaux vivant whilst whispering and shouting out perscribed prose woven in with improvised dialogues. We are the Landscape has dystopian science fiction qualities to it the performers move around the audience wearing costumes made out of symbols found on the QWERTY keyboard, smoke e cigarettes and wrap themselves in hydrothermal blankets whilst speaking multiple languages. The work was made through a series of conversations that formed organically in the garden of the building; surrounding topics of action, protest and choice. Certain structures were then put into place to explore the potentials for creating a group consciousness that could lead to something, and the work was about how this could then be potentially represented. The work was made crucially as a response to the news of the eviction from the building. The work aimed to explore the precariousness of many young women's live/work situations and aims to critique London's neo-liberal environment, and the gentrification of the city. I believe we are entrenched in a deeply surreal and dystopic reality, but have grown so accustomed to it that we no longer even notice. My intention, in part, was to defamiliarize the environment, in order to make evident what is already present. I was interested in depicting and portraying everyday science fictions, because as J.G.Ballard writes; "Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century."

WHAT is it?

Sex symbolism is a seven minute looped video of my partners hands acting out various sex symbolist hand signage. The projected video fills the a wall, scaling the hands a similar size to that of a human standing. The work has a soft psychedelic pallet and is very simple in its execution. The simplicity of its style aims to reflect the subtlety of these gestures and there bodily transcendence as signifiers of power throughout time. At one point in the video a gun gesture with the hand is fired, representing a female destruction and take over of such symbols of power.

HOW was it made? I shot the video working through the performing of hang sex-symbols; The Sign of the creator. Holy Trinity. Gesture of Catholic and Episcopal priests in giving benediction. Jewish benediction. Vesica Pisces. Sign of the horns. Phallic sign. Mystic signs of Jewish rabbis. Sign of the fig. Yoni sign.

WHY did you make it? I made this work because many of these symbols' have associations with bigoted state and religious institutions, which promote homophobia or simply preach how individuals should live. Through the isolation of my partner's hands, I wanted an association to be made with swearing or other universal forms or gestures of aggression. Moreover, looking at the hands as a dominant prehensile organ and their dominant use within lesbian sex.

But with a further insight into what happens when you severe a body part.