reading the rock
Sophie Seita, performance, 2022
Reading the Rock
In response to her installation My Contact Aureoles, Sophie Seita’s lecture performance Reading the Rock explores poetic and geophilosophical questions about time, embedded histories, and queer intimacy. It bends into and around different body-and rock-formations—responding to the metamorphic, igneous, and sedimentary rocks in the Big Bend National Park on the border between West Texas and Mexico. The piece harnesses other materials and voices to tease out the complex from the simple and vice versa, all pivoting around some questions that animate her work in the show: How can a work hold a moment, translate it, make it tangible and yet remain ultimately unknowable? Or more simply: How can I experience this enough?
Performances
Hoxton253, London, Feb 2022. Photographs: Mirko Boffelli Photography (2022). Performed inside the installation My Contact Aureoles.
molto molto, Brighton, Sep 2022. Photographs: lee rae walsh (2022). Performed against the backdrop of a new textile work, withwithwith.
a.p./Callie’s, Berlin, Nov 2023. Photographs: Lea Hopp (2023)
McCormack Family Theater, Providence, Rhode Island (2023), photo courtesy of the artist.
Costume:
Two-colour screen-printed photograph on white French terry jersey fabric (2022). Photographs: Laura Cobb (2022)
Funding:
’Hello again, Hackney’ Grant, Hackney Council;
Eaton Fund
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under Germany’s Excellence Strategy in the context of the Cluster of Excellence ‘Temporal Communities’ – EXC 2020 – Project ID 390608380.
Artist in Residency Programme, Literary Arts, Brown University