PEARL AND THEORY MAKE COMPOST
Intergenerational collaboration with Kate Clayton
Performance, video piece, community-oriented project (2020–2021)
Kate Clayton and Sophie Seita met in a small cafe on an empty Keralan beach in December 2019. A mutual interest in literature, laughter, reading, and queerness led us to discuss the possibility of collaborating. From our respective homes in the first lockdown in 2020, we slowly began to dig out the shell of a project and created two artistic personas to help us in our experiment. Compost became our metaphor for intergenerational dialogue. For transformation. Compost is a re-interpretation of the earth to create a new form. A fermenting. A digesting. The earth eating itself. Compost creates new life by killing old life. Pearl (Kate) is the character who oversees this process. Theory (Sophie) is the artist-as-researcher who contextualises, conjectures, cites the veritable Authorities to get a little closer to the gist of the matter. Eventually, Sophie might shed the Mask of Theory, which is her mascot and burden. Pearl believes in the need to live and let live. They are together in this breeding ground for novel ideas.
Sometimes Pearl feeds the compost some lines of pearl-poems under the direction and instruction of Theory. Getting down and dirty with compost also means facing hard truths, grappling with the cloudy, the mucky, the muted. An experiment in touch as knowledge. A different kind of sensuality. Healthy compost consists of alternate, complementary layers. Old habits and behaviours need to go into the bin to be transformed by a feasible and sustainable way forward and a new politics of care. In a time of precarity and isolation, Pearl and Theory move through what they have in common like insects move through compost. Guided and prepared by theoretical reflection, the soil and materials they bring into bed allow them to dig into rich layers of reality, chewing, chewing, chewing, to spit out new ideas.
Currently, they’re working on the next stage of their project, supported by Creative Scotland and a-n, focusing on sustainability, extinction, mortality, futurity, and making work in a rural context, in light of climate change.
Screening and performance:
Hundred Years Gallery, June 2021
Womxn Performing Selves, Internationales Frauen* Theaterfestival, Frankfurt, video installation in ‘Pandora’s Box’.
Photos:
Laura Cobb (performance) and Kate Clayton/Sophie Seita (video stills and in=progress work)
Press:
SPAM Plaza (2021)
Funding:
Creative Scotland, Open Fund (2021)
a-n: Time Space Money (2020 and 2021)