these devices became law
These Devices Became Law, 2024
textile piece (digital pigment ink print on 100% cotton gauze in two pieces, top: 136x133cm in 112gsm; and bottom: 99x43cm in 125gsm); and performance
These Devices Became Law is a new performance and textile work by Sophie Seita that responds to two historical utopias (Thomas More’s Utopia and Madeleine de Scudéry’s Clélie), their promises, flaws, and fault lines. Seita’s performance costume, which overlays reproductions of historical maps with her own ink and soft pastel drawings, is printed onto double gauze, a fabric chosen specifically for its etymological and historical link to Gaza, Palestine. She recalls queer performance theorist Jose Muñoz who defined utopia as ‘not prescriptive; […] a horizon of possibility, not a fixed schema’, but also importantly as ‘a stage’. In the process, Seita’s work interrogates and imagines deconstructed geographies, violent maps, tender maps, queer maps, unnavigable maps, indecipherable maps—the gauze that dresses a wound.
Commissioned by Akademie der Künste for ‘New Forgotten Utopias’, the work is situated within a larger project on queer performance scores that uses artistic research, experimental drawing, and somatic workshops, developed in dialogue with Creative Darlington, Darlington Library, Curious Arts, and in the context of the Werner Düttmann Fellowship at Akademie der Künste, Berlin.
Events/Performances:
Akademie der Künste, Berlin, May 2024, and Open Studios, Akademie der Künste, with music by Eve Singleton, September 2024
Middlesbrough Arts Week, performance at Pineapple Black, curated by The Auxiliary, Sep 2024
The New Present Tense, FAC (Feminist Autonomous Centre), Athens, curated by Dimitra Ioannou, Nov 2024
Funding:
Werner Düttmann Fellowship, Akademie der Künste, Berlin
Photographs:
(garment sculptures, in studio/installation) Laura Cobb, 2024; (performance Berlin) Stefanie Walk and Jo @aurali_sm, 2024; (performance, Middlesbrough Art Week) Rachel Deakin
