To sit down in darkness
To make your way in this space
That is inside your body
That is not quite consciousness
That is guided by these two unlikely hosts
That prompts questions surrounding the narratives that collide onto our bodies
The technology of our bodies
The fragility
And uncanny assembly
The aesthetics of affect and the keen sense of
(silence).
The plastic smell
The hollows of the hand
The threads of hair
The digestive fluids
The small current
The spine
Put up your hands
Don’t fall in
Stay here
Touch the skin all smooth and stretching
Don’t blink
A perpetual inventory of adaptation
And of textures, surfaces, fluids, responses, synapses.
Something I’ve seen before,
But has grown into itself,
Magnetic
Pensive
Nostalgic
And searching.
Vignettes that gaze into the body
Whilst we think of skin and bones
Of territories of in between
Of the uncanny and of cutting through plastic skin.
The sounds of heartbeats and locked basements
And the eerie gaze of two performers
And the heartbeat of my doll
(I am growing a body inside my body,
And I thought of their heartbeats collapsing into each other
The real and the fabricated
Somewhere in processes of
Finding the human element
And growing affect
And immunities and ways of being
But not quite being fully yet).
It begins with an assembly
And the image keeps growing.
The body and representation, teased out,
The body as a metaphor
The body as container
The body as production
The body as communicator.
It’s not just the power of the performers
Tricksters of the senses
Twisting meaning
From the human to the anthropomorphic,
Dystopias
Internal landscapes
Zooming in on individuals hairs
On heartbeats
On small currents
On automata.
Relentlessly probing at the lines and edges
Between puppet and human
Between dissection and query
Between staging and enacting
Between recognition and ambiguity.
(The birthday party as the ultimate tease
Of boundaries and borders
Bodies and sugar levels
Heart beats and pass the parcel
And stop).
The human body is something other
A bit of a cyborg
A bit of a doll
A bit of an object
A bit of a thing.
The infrastructure of the body is something other
Caught in the fixed gaze of the doll without a spine
The toy without a heartbeat
The movement without soul
The speaking without a nervous system.
And Nigel and Jess,
They appear on the edges
They steer us through
These dioramas of internal and external landscapes
Of pop culture and flippant humour
Of sharp satire and biting questions
That distill themselves in images
Which linger,
On top of each other
Superimposed onto memories
In the mechanical sounds of dolls
And their uncanny orchestration
Of life.