Before I could look you in the eye (2025)

BEFORE I COULD LOOK YOU IN THE EYE, I WALKED SIGHTLESS THROUGH THE FOREST AND THREW THE WORLD UP (2025)

All images by Willie Siau

Participatory Performance
March 29th
3:30-6:30pm
Carnegie Library Hub, Brixton, London

Part of the Art and Politics Intervention "The Embassy of Fugitivity" devised by the Spring 2025 Designing Politics cohort. Led by module convener Jol Thoms with the support of Bernadette Buckley.

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“Moments of disorientation are vital. They are bodily experiences that throw the world up or throw the body from its ground. Disorientation as a bodily feeling can be unsettling and it can shatter one's sense of confidence in the ground or the belief that the ground on which we reside can support the actions that make a life feel livable.” ( Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 2006: p. 157)

This is a work about questions. This is a work about illegibility. This is a performative experiment in imagining ourselves outside of the roles that have already been designed for us.

When we were born, we were assigned things
Woman, man
Heterosexual
Legacy
Inheritance
Producer of family
Producer of nation state
These things told us how to act, how to hold our bodies, how to feel shit in our bodies, how to understand what our bodies are and what they’re for
It taught us belonging
Ownership
It taught us we belong to a category of person and that we have obligations and manifestations and things that feel that should be channeled into ideologies
It taught us to love what hurts us
To suffer
Sacrifice
That the only way out
Is through

It isn't.

The body knows another way and it will find us on the darkest night of the year, or of our life, and it will take us somewhere we’ve never been before.

So we'll close our eyes
Feel our fear
And run

Into a body of jagged things and howling beings and wet textures.

And we will fall and hit our head and there will be some blood.

But when we open our eyes, we will find ourselves in the forest with the others, the ones who also ran here sightless and disoriented and without a relation that they could grab onto and submit to and say yes I’ll do anything to please you and make you love me in that way that love feels like a hand around your throat.

All the roles we have ever been taught to play are shit. Let’s do something else together. Let’s imagine together. The body knows the way.