DESIRE LINES
Research-based work-in-progress performance,, a collaboration with Simone Kearney
DESIRE LINES follows the lines and orientations of Sara Ahmed’s book Queer Phenomenology (2006). In this performative translation of Ahmed’s work into movement and material, Sophie Seita and Simone Kearney are uttering the text across space, at oblique angles, with delays. Materials and props included clay, paper, projections, string, a table, two chairs.
‘We could ask, for instance, whether queer tables are the tables around which queer bodies gather.[…] The table might be the site upon which queer points can be made. [...] there is something rather queer about furniture. [...] We furnish space with “movable objects”. [...] movability is a condition of the meaning for furniture. You can move the table, here, there, into the corner of the room; in a sense the purpose of the table relies on your capacity to move it around. [...] yet I think that is a misrecognition. Instead, the table follows you around. The table is an effect of what it is that you do. [...] Queer furnishing is not, therefore, such a surprising formulation: the word “furnish” is related to the word “perform” and thus relates to the very question of how things appear. Queer becomes a matter of how things appear, how they gather, how they perform, to create the edges of spaces and worlds.’
—Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, p. 167
Work-in-progress workshop performance with audience discussion:
Raven Row, London (2019)