Photo by Fenia Kotsopoulou.

with bare feet touching the sky I yearn

2022

Underpinned by a deep sense of longing that is about both loss and desire, with bare feet touching the sky I yearn calls to a trans* futurity which is wilder and more raw than the anxious, ossifying present. This futurity is multiplicitous - shrouded, erotic, and non-linear. It is bound up with more-than-human ecologies and, like life itself, it is chaotic and non-binary.

Prophetic fictions compost with dried flowers, soil and natural pigments; a wormhole is opened in the earth and the boundaries between human subjectivity and the worlds beyond are made porous; sweaty, bloody gestural embodiments of yearning and rudimentary chroma-keying facilitates a symbolic, DIY diffusion of selfhood; and the poetic resonances of texts, movements, materials and actions are offered to those gathered as a divinatory device. The work offers no clear path but rather an invitation - to step into a more mythic time, a space for dreaming, grieving, desiring and communing.

Commissioned by ICA (London)
Production support by Ash McNaughton
Supported with public funds by Arts Council England.
With thanks to Sara Sassanelli

Response

words by Daniella Valz Gen

Soil
A suspended carcass Ribbon
A metal bucket
A video projection
A spade
Candles
Needles

The scene itself is full of ghosts and expectation.

I wait in the red light and smell the soil,
the hum gets into my spine :
I feel my inner waters vibrate as I look at dry bones.

The sizzle of a blowtorch Smoke, a faint scent of gas

(My eyes burn)
Embers flicker on the tip of a wooden pole

Stone on a metal spade Stone in a mouth,
play

Knocking about knock knock knock

(A call, persistent)

What is this sense of foreboding? Where are we?
What else is there?
Who?

The sound of fire bursts
Black wax drips on Joseph’s pale chest

—Tattoos Sigils Lace—

Like the carcass that presides over the space
As if saying: we too are already dead

We are with death
in a tangle of shimmery ribbon

An open mouth pulling on cord

Across space Across time Across life

I feel Joseph’s mouth in my spine and my rib cage: pulling at my tendons, my own carcass.

Psychopomp childlike and in black satin, their flesh pierced
as if to say:

I’m here I bleed I’m here

Alive
(I’m here with you)

From blood to clay
From red to fade
A desire to exit
A gesture towards absolute presence and effacement at the same time

The space has been pierced
All that’s left is a sad tender holding

Photos by Fenia Kotsopoulou. Videography and editing by Baiba Sprance and Marco Beradi.