This is for sure my third, if not my fourth, application to speak at TEDx Victoria.
I am prepared for further rejection but I can share my proposed talk on my blog (this includes writing from previous blog posts):
Einstein said: No problem can be solved from the same level of
consciousness that created it.
Audre Lorde said: The master's tools will never dismantle the
master's house.
But industrialized culture has us humans more stuck in old
systems of domination and destruction than ever. A simple way to put this is:
civilization is destroying civilization.
I believe the main reason behind this stuckness is that, because
of deeply ingrained cultural and neurobiological tendencies, we have created a
world where the body has no place in the body politic except to reinforce old
strategies of safety.
Since 2006 I have been showing up in performance naked and
unscripted. An irony of the project is that this simple statement provokes
enough of an emotional reaction that, if anyone is patient enough to notice, it
handily demonstrates that even the suggestion of placing the body back into the
body politic affects consciousness rather strikingly.
I share and create a space for vulnerability by showing up as
authentically and vulnerably as I am able to in the moment. Another of the
project’s great ironies is that I need to create a performance to arrange such
a situation.
Performances are voluntarily participatory and experiences vary.
There are conversations and silences, tears and confusion. The gesture of
showing up vulnerable and undefended allows many people to encounter a rare,
non-dogma-related experience of a much deeper connection with humanity while in
community with strangers.
My work can be seen as non-rhetorical cultural
criticism/cultural realignment. One of my arguments/experiential offerings is
that, at this time in human history, we must finally acknowledge that we are
all intimately related.
So, yes, my work seriously disrupts notions of what is private
and what is public. My work also echoes what many indigenous cultures already
know and embody.
I believe that the only way forward for humanity lies in acknowledging
and owning our shared vulnerability. We are at a place of urgency where, in my
opinion, the privileged people of the world are called to expand beyond the
concept of human rights into taking on human responsibilities.
In other words, my audience includes the TED audience and other
privileged Westerners. We created the mess, we have the most power, and we have
the most responsibility.
My project is called the Human Body Project and, while it
intersects many disciplines and categories, can best be categorized as
performance art and activism.
One key reason the work lies in the realm of art is because,
although I am outspoken about many issues, my body and self as an artifact
exist outside of ideology and political affiliation.
In January of 2012 I decided to push my work beyond performance
venues. I committed to doing a Human Body Project Vulnerability Vigil at least
once a month until I die.
For a Vulnerability Vigil I show up naked in the street for an
hour at least once a month.
 |
| September 2014 Vulnerability Vigil in front of the VAG. |
Because I understand that people on the street may be seriously
affronted by public nudity, I always hold a large sign, which for many months
was a really long word: VULNERABLE. Lately I’ve been holding a sign with the
extinction symbol on it.
There are many reasons I decided to take the work out into the
street:
- As I said, the work intersects many disciplines and categories
but, as you can imagine, there is almost no place for it. I can’t even begin to
list the various rejections. Mostly it has existed in fringe theatre festivals,
which are lottery-based. And, even if chosen in the lottery, it is expensive
and difficult for me to get to any beyond Victoria and Vancouver
- As an outlet for my own grief and rage
- To stand in some solidarity with the world's most vulnerable
- To continue to provoke a serious consideration of our own and
our planet's vulnerability
So I also see the work on a continuum of non-violent direct
action. We live in a democracy and, if nothing else, what I’m doing is
peacefully disrupting status quo and practicing participatory democracy.
Doing what I do is WAY outside of the culture I was born into—privileged,
upper middle class, female, white, Canadian born in the 1960s—and WAY outside
my comfort zones.
So what's it like to do what I do?
I am a
supersensitive person. Through years of dealing with my pain and shame, I have
come to understand that I am like a conduit for the unfelt feelings of others.
I am pretty much always dealing with resistance, disgust, pessimism,
depression, rage, as well as physical symptoms. I feel stuck and complicit in a
culture of mostly invisible brutality. I often struggle to breathe.
I especially relate
to this piece by Mark Fisher, another activist, scholar and person who uses his
grief in his work. He links depression to social conditions and says
"Someone who moves out of the social sphere they are ‘supposed’ to occupy
is always in danger of being overcome by feelings of vertigo, panic and horror…
you have no right to be here, now, inhabiting this body… you are a nothing, and
‘nothing’ is quite literally what you feel you are about to become.”
My
grotty house and stinker kids are also pertinent to the question. I am
a 52-year-old mother of two precocious kids under 13. I am older than many of
my youngest daughter's friends' grandmothers. Also, my kids are related to me.
They are delightful and exhausting.
So doing the Human Body Project takes place, for me, in a context of
complicated shame, anger, and fatigue.
I mentioned earlier some of the background to this work. It's not about
"thriving" or "joy." My work is often dismissed as a
downer. Although I do often end up having fun and enjoying myself, which is a
nice bonus.
Before a Vulnerability Vigil, I will often collapse, sometimes for days. I
don't have a woman-cave in my house and I am challenged setting boundaries with
my spirited children. I am also severely challenged by the
attention-deficit-juggling modernity requires. And I'm also a pure and
simple idiot at asking for what I need (partly because I'm not sure it
even exists; I’m a none-of-us-has-made-it-until-all-of-us-has-made-it kind of a
gal).
Collapsing is, I think, my being's way of recharging. It sucks though, because
anything resembling normal functioning is very difficult.
Right before I show up to a Vulnerability Vigil, I feel like puking.
I have done more than 30 vigils. My experience is they don't get easier.
I am afraid of conflict. Haha. I am always going against my training and
epigenetic make-up that cause me to be compliant. I worry a little about
arrest, but more about cops and what they represent. I don't want to be rude or
disrespectful! I really don't. I am a born and trained conformist who
can't find anything to conform to.
I
worry about my children's friends' parents seeing me. I worry about my neighbors seeing
me. I worry about meany-bums. I worry about people thinking I'm crazy. I feel
crazy.
Then there's my body. Did I mention that I'm 52? I guess when I'm 60 I'll think
I looked good. I started the Human Body Project eight years ago and that woman
I was then, whom I thought was rather flabby and aged, now looks quite
fetching. Let's just say the flab and agedness continue apace. Plus hairiness.
Then there's the whole being naked thing. I feel shame. Not because it makes
any sense at all. It does not. Unless you count the millennia of training my
people have sustained. So I do.
So, I show up at a place.
I
find it difficult to speak to whomever I'm with until we get going. I am metaphorically
evacuating my bowels and speech is difficult.
Getting undressed is tricky. I am conscious of not feeling sexy and my not
perfectly sanitary underwear. I try to find a place to be discreet. I hate it
when I forget a bag to put the clothes in. They get rained on a lot.
It's always cold. But my armpits are always sweaty.
One winter vigil this year, for instance, was particularly nasty. The person
who was with me and I were not able to last the full hour. During the time we
were out there freezing, I started singing and dancing. I often do sing and
dance a little bit but this time I was so cold I did it the whole time. I was
jumping and squatting and full on doing my own version of a tribal dance. It
felt good.
I may not be naked positive but, like skinny dipping, being naked outside feels
good on my skin. I like having air on my vulva. Even frigid air. We have
affinities, of course, but I don't consider myself a nudist. I get where
they're coming from though. Bare skin is freeing.
We're undressed and trying to get in place and hold the sign in front of us
awkwardly at first.
The sign is big and unwieldy, weirdly heavy. I have often used words that are
eight or more letters. Honestly, I would just write FUCK every month because
that would be easier and really sum it up for me, but I see how it might not be
gentle. Holding the sign for an hour is difficult. My fingers get cramped
and my arms and shoulders sag.
I always think about the placement of the sign, where we will stand, how it
will photograph or be seen. I am annoyed when it blows around or someone
isn't holding it taut.
I
am always annoyed, period, by the compromise of the sign. As an artist, I want
people to be jarred out of complacency. But at the same time I don't like the
idea of getting in people's faces. It feels unkind. The sign is there, as I
mentioned, to shield my nudity because for many people public nudity is so
affronting. It's a compromise and a gesture of gentleness and I keep
making that decision because it feels right but it still annoys me.
Victoria cops are quite respectful. If cops come over and seem uncomfortable, I
offer to put on my underpants. There is no cause for arrest if genitals are
covered.
They always say it's because kids might walk by (I'm behind a sign and in
front of a hedge, but ok). I always feel bad for them. Mostly they don't look
like they want to bother us.
I inadvertently scheduled a vigil at the Santa
Claus parade launching area. We were there much earlier than the parade start
time but, still, a paddy wagon, ghost car and several police dudes hung
about the whole time. Unnerving to invite so much weaponry.
Vulnerability Vigils give me an opportunity, as
a privileged person, to experience a broader understanding of my relationship
citizen to state.
Some people think I'm brave and, by addressing
and taking on my demons, I am. But I also find my demons so pathetic. So a cop
takes my name. So my butt is flabby. So I feel embarrassment and shame. So
what? Big deal.
But that's what I'm working with. It's such a
not big deal and, I would argue, the nub of what's killing us.
In other words, those difficult emotions hold
me back and, I would guess, hold many people back. But I am living at a time
when my difficult emotions are hardly the point, especially when I have the
opportunity to make a difference.
A
Vulnerability Vigil is an experiential exercise in, among other things, containing
paradox. To spell it out, my pain living in my culture leads me to actions
outside of my culture that lead to different difficult feelings, including
feelings of ostracism and futility. Challenging.
People
ask me what my goal is.
“Being
the change,” public education, inspiration… I suggest that my activism is a
version of non-violent public ritual and action, a form of art.
Edward
Burtynsky, the great photographer of landscapes transformed by industry, talks
about how he positions his work: “If I say this a terrible thing we’re doing to
the planet, then people will either agree or disagree. By not saying what you
should see, that may allow them to see their world a little differently. It’s
not a simple right or wrong. It needs a whole new way of thinking.”
I’m
doing what I am able to create that new way.
