<div dir="ltr"><div>Hello all! Sorry for my quietness on this forum! I've been loving all the posts.<br><br><div style="text-align:left">I just returned from a Essential Departures, a week-long feminist experiment testing (and
subverting) the parallels drawn between women’s bodies and Nature at
Rosekill Farm, a performance venue in rural Upstate New York, which I have been co-organizing with Poppy Jackson (<a href="http://poppyjackson.co.uk/">http://poppyjackson.co.uk/ </a>),<br>Jill McDermid (<a href="http://www.grace-exhibition-space.com/performance.php?event_id=486">http://www.grace-exhibition-space.com/performance.php?event_id=486 </a>) <br>and Mairead Delaney ( <a href="http://ladyclever.com/culture/mairead-delaney-on-symphysiotomy-activism-and-art/">http://ladyclever.com/culture/mairead-delaney-on-symphysiotomy-activism-and-art/ </a>) <br>for the past two years. Our format is egalitarian and collective, and the work we make together and separately builds a community of international artists that support one another both in our public artmaking and private lives throughout the year. This year 12 women came together to work, live, eat, and make performance. Mairead Delaney, an Irish-American performance artist helped compile this bit of writing disseminated out of our communal conversations. <br></div><br></div>+<br><div><div><br>What happens when female identifying live artists rattle essentialisms
around being intrinsically bound to Nature? Knowing these analogies are
historically tied to sexist, racist and colonialist discourses around
purity, fertility, and the earth, can we form a new politics of the
rural?<br>Women are subjected to discourses around property and bodies, whether
those bodies be flesh bodies, soil bodies, or bodies of water. We are
contested ground-- possessed or dispossessed. And, no matter where we
stand, how we move, where we come to rest, we will find ourselves on
contested ground. We propose Rosekill as site and opportunity to explore
these bodies, exiled spaces and liminal grounds. Exploring these
cracks, cracks as much on our skin as in the planet’s fault lines, may
allow us to consider complicity in and articulate resistance to
oppressive colonial and neoliberal discourses. We may depart from our
usual roads, but we do not come to Rosekill to escape or retreat.
Through performance we have the power to act in these in-between-places,
places of boundaries and borders, to form new bodies and to diffuse our
embodied knowledge through space.<br><p>Our week at Rosekill will be collaborative and rigorous. We will
approach our subject with workshops, seminars, discussions, culminating
with the presentation of solo work. We will balance structure and
contributing content with time and space to create and collaborate.</p><p>Rosekill
Farm will provide a space to incubate and collaborate. Radical
practitioners can share in a process of exploration, and present
developed works on our communal core subject of articulating ourselves
as distinct from, yet responsive to and activist in, our surroundings.
Autonomous in our identities as women, we will consider the immediacy of
the body and its potential for compassionate communication through the
nonverbal. How are we complicit in our own fetishization? We need
distinction from essentialized notions of the feminine in nature to
regard ourselves clearly and to act in proximity to-- not mired in-- our
realm.</p>Our testing grounds will be copses, swamps, and overgrown meadows. Our
site buildings are hay barns and sheds. Our human bodies are earthly,
biological bodies, yes. But our female-identifying bodies are not
‘closer’ to nature for that identification, nor is nature a woman to be
wooed or plundered, bewitched by or won. Our time at Rosekill will be
spent in an attempt to make distinct our bodies, their actions and our
connectivity on site.<br></div><div>-MD<br></div><div><br>+<br><br></div><div>This year our work and conversation focused not only on de-essentializing our selves in Nature, but also reached into our own histories, political bodies, and communal experience to investigate how to embody the information that we socially compile into performance actions and interventions. I have been working with my own narrative, reaching into my experience growing up in West Virginia then moving to southwest Virginia, where camo, four-wheeling, moonshine, Bud Lite, mudding, and all other redneck aesthetics and lifestyle are the everyday. This has led me to be able to talk about that experience, now that I have removed myself from it, currently residing in Brooklyn New York. Sometimes we can see something better from far away. <br><br>Here is my ongoing research:<br><br><p class="gmail-MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify;line-height:150%"><span>How does the cultural symbolism
of flags/politicalized logos/geographic boundaries dictate our reaction to
place/topographies/bodies? How are those symbols remade into a more complex
reading of identity, belonging to a place, or social resistance? Does the
elimination or resurgence of a symbol through production, legislation, or
display hold power to form political or social ideals, or is it merely giving a
unifying voice to long held belief systems? Through a process of dressing/addressing
these issues through research, performance actions, and embodied productions, I
am interested in navigating one of the most disputed, reviled, legislated, and
defended symbols in the US today: the Confederate flag.</span></p>
<p class="gmail-MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify;line-height:150%"><b><span>Research:</span></b></p>
<p class="gmail-MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify;line-height:150%"><i><span>My
fiancé looked out the window. I kept my eyes on the road as we inched past a
dawdling semi-truck. We were driving south through Maryland to my family’s home
in West Virginia. He pointed excitedly at a long field of cars on the side of
the highway. DIXIE CAR AUCTION. <span> </span>He
scanned the familiar Rebel<span> </span>X emblazoned
on every side of a chain-link fence. “I thought there would be more flags…” A
few minutes later he turns to me, trying to get a reaction. We passed a road
marker for Negro Mountain. “We are on the south side of the Mason-Dixon line,”
I reply and I turn up the radio. Kanye. </span></i></p>
<p class="gmail-MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify;line-height:150%"><span>If it weren’t for the 1948
segregationist Dixiecrat political party, the rebel flag would still be moldering
in poorly lit Civil War Battlefield mini-museums. Never used as an official national
Confederate flag, numerous versions of the Southern Cross were carried into
battle by a few rebel regiments. One such version has been passed down in my
family, a gunpowder singed reminder of an old familial divide with brothers split
between fighting for the North and for the South. The Dixiecrats, a civil
rights reactionist (racist) political movement, heavily influenced and funded
by the KKK (allegedly), repurposed the rebel flag as a symbol of segregation in
the 1950’s. The flag was flown over Ole Miss in protest of integration, and
quickly added to many of the southern state’s flags in support of the
Dixiecrat’s white supremacist political aims. Production and distribution of
the flag increased from the 1950’s onward, now inundating the consumer market
with batches of ten thousands shipped to the US from China. </span></p>
<p class="gmail-MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify;line-height:150%"><span>Fast-forward to today. My
home-state, West Virginia, had a very different climate post-Civil War to its’
former shared borders within secessionist Virginia. What is now northern West
Virginia broke off from Virginia in the midst of the Civil War period, taking
the southern part of the state with them through Union military intervention.
The ensuing hundred year struggle in labor wars and European immigration gave
the state a rugged “Mountaineer” pride as opposed to “Southern” pride found on
the other side of the Shenandoah Mountains. This resulted in our own contested
symbols of the coal industry, but little identification with the confederate
flag as a cultural icon. </span></p>
<p class="gmail-MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify;line-height:150%"><span>I didn’t grow up seeing
Confederate flags daily until I moved to southern Virginia in my late teens.
Monuments to fallen confederate soldiers, <i>southern
and proud</i> bumper stickers, rebel flags waving from front porches, and
Dixieland bikinis drooping from wire hangers at the flea market were all
ubiquitous symbols of the self-claimed disenfranchised whites of the South. Redneck
pride (a term popularized during the West Virginia coal wars, actually, because
the miners wore red bandanas around their necks to avoid shooting one another)
is now being critiqued by Republicans as an identity politics based faction of
the conservative party. The repositioning within political thought of the
reclaimed pejorative term “redneck” as a minority with specific political and
social aims has centered on the debate of the erection or censorship of what is
now known as the Confederate flag. </span></p>
<p class="gmail-MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify;line-height:150%"><span>The confederate flag is the most
censored, legislated, and politicized emblem in America today. Articles are
written almost daily surrounding the production, removal, or erection of this
polarizing symbol. A 2015 Gallup poll found that almost three-fourths of black
Americans consider the symbol racist and almost two-thirds of white Americans
see it as a symbol of pride and heritage. Kanye appropriates it and says “It’s
my flag now. Now what are you going to do?” Walmart stops selling it. </span></p>
<p class="gmail-MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify;line-height:150%"><span>The Dixie flag, originally a
battle flag of the secessionist South in support of slavery, then a political
symbol in support of segregation, is now appropriated by a wider cross-section
of America as a battle flag of cultural resistance to a rapidly non-white
majority population. This “resistance”, I would argue, is not only for a white
supremacy, but for a white <i>male</i>
supremacy. The boundaries of identity relating to heritage, geography, or
lineage dissolve as disgruntled white northerners descend to southern pro-confederate
flag protests, and the recent surge of confederate flags at presidential visits
and political rallies across the U.S. indicate that the symbol is morphing into
a new call to arms amongst poor white men across the country. </span></p>
<p class="gmail-MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify;line-height:150%"><span>There is an increasing nostalgia
for a fictional time when all white men were prosperous and powerful. Working
class white men with a chip on their shoulder are flocking to the symbol of a
secessionist south, a rebel state within the borders of the US where DC, NYC,
and LA are cut off. This intangible rebel state is a strange reflection of the
original rebellion. A Civil War that divided the nation, based on 5% of the
Confederacy’s population insistence on their right to buy, sell, and keep
slaves, was fought primarily by southern poor whites and conscripted slaves. While
all able bodied men between the ages of 17-50 were drafted, wealthy Southern
men were allowed to pay a working class man to take his place on the
battlefront. Today, the same class of men discovered an old ideology with a new
pundit’s face and raises their supremacist banner once again. <br></span></p><p class="gmail-MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify;line-height:150%">-TR</p><p class="gmail-MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify;line-height:150%">As a final public performance at the end of the Essential Departures week, I performed an action then durational work titled MudFlaps. It is the beginning of my physical performance based investigation of the Confederate flag. I stuck <a href="http://decalscity.com/products/ruger-gun-rebel-confederate-flag-vinyl-die-cut-decal-sticker">two mudflap girl silhouette stickers </a>embedded with the rebel flag on my lower back as both tramp stamps and equating my ass to truck mudflaps. <br></p><p class="gmail-MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify;line-height:150%">You can see images of the performance on my Instagram account <a href="https://www.instagram.com/agrobaby/">agrobaby</a> by adding me. <br></p><p class="gmail-MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify;line-height:150%"><font size="2"><span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><span>Agrofemme: A durational performance "MudFlaps" in which I filled tire tracks with
hose water and fell in a full face plant in the puddle...I tasted mud
and blood from a busted lip and blood and snot ran down my throat from a
cracked nose. I lay still where I fell as the water absorbed back into
the earth until the sun burnt the negative of the decals into my back.
People walked by snapping photos in forensic curiosity. Some people
wanted to help me. <a href="https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/whitewomenarethefaceofracism/">#whitewomenarethefaceofracism</a> <a href="https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/rosekillfarm/">#rosekillfarm</a> <a class="gmail-notranslate" href="https://www.instagram.com/graceexhibitionspace/">@graceexhibitionspace</a> <a href="https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/essentialdepartures/">#essentialdepartures</a></span></span></font></p><p class="gmail-MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify;line-height:150%"><br><font size="2"><span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><span></span></span></font></p><p class="gmail-MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify;line-height:150%"><font size="2"><span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><span><a href="https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/essentialdepartures/"><br></a></span></span></font></p><p class="gmail-MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify;line-height:150%"><br></p><p class="gmail-MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify;line-height:150%"><span></span></p></div><div><br></div></div></div>