The circumstances and events that have developed in the past weeks have brought feelings of despair, tension, anger, fear, and frustration, only to name a few. In the middle of a series of protests, the question of how we each fight for justice arises.
For this iteration of Looking Forward while Looking Back, we have brought together the work of Freya Powell, Sophie Dupont, and Io Makandal. Their works intersect as expressions of recognition of different contemporary tragedies (states of unease), as ways of confronting, challenging, dissenting, and honoring what has been lost.
“Pervasive forms of inequality have established that some lives are disproportionately more livable and grievable than others” (1). In this context, Only Remains Remain, by Freya Powell, pays homage to the lives of unidentified migrants in mass graves by exploring the mournful potential of the human voice through pitch, intonation, breath, movement, and pause, invoking the silence of their burial and acknowledging our collective complicity and grief.
Sophie Dupont´s Body Full of Breath performance investigates what it means to be alive by fully filling her lungs and emptying them –evoking the cycle of life and death– at a time when the ability to breathe becomes an act of resistance that enables a voice, a movement, and a shared wind.
For Io Makandal, monuments reflect societies that are obsessed with a distorted idea of progress. They act as fictional spaces and places that illustrate an ambiguous relation between dreamed and created environments. In Life in the Entropics, Makandal rebuilds structures with detritus of the city of Johannesburg as material expressions of chaos and dis-order.
From material expressions of entropy to the collective power of the voice when mourning and asserting our equal state as human beings at the moment of existence, these works explore different ways in which, from the personal to the collective, we aim to recover our rights to mourn, to be named, to demand change, to re-build, to breathe.
(1) Judith Butler, The Force of Non-Violence