Digging into dirt
SEEDS Festival Plainfield US
August 2009

Something about Gender II
September-November 2009
with LeeLee Davis, Alexandra Hazisavvas, Simon Rabyniuk, David Rendall, Brescia N. Reid and Cara Spooner

We aimed at visiting the body we had when we were a 41 day-old embryo.

We worked from the body through an intuitive mind. We prepared ourselves by facing some of our relationship with mother, with water, with our tail. We looked for movement in our sexual organs. We listened to some of the beliefs we hold in these organs.

In other words, we worked with sexual identity and not directly with gender identity. Why that? Well, I (Claudia) feel that it is very tricky, if not impossible, to address body knowledge about gender identity in a direct way. In me, for example, whatever is there vanishes away if i look at it directly. Or, maybe my body does not know what "gender identity" is and an indirect approach has been way more informative in the past. And, also, my own gender identity is very much informed/misinformed by my body history, i.e. by whatever is materialized in this body. So, I am interested in deconstructing the body to reach something deeper.

41 days human embryo:

12 mm long, has a tail, has no external genitals and has a bisexual sexual system inside.
1) ombilical cord - 2) nose - 3) eye - 4, 5) developing ear - 6) hand

Something about Gender I
February-April 2008
with Alexandra Hazisavvas, Yumi Onose and Joce Tremblay

We let our bodies know that we were on a journey about gender and we trusted them. I (Claudia) chose the left side of the body as a thread for the work. Most sessions started with a warm up which was followed by an exploration (concrete as a material, death, self-animosity, ...) and we ended with a intuitive journey from our left sides, combining the body that came out of the exercise with the intuitive instruction to explore that left side.