Performance
Forthcoming (Not Yet Here, But Always Been There) (2022)
Text originally published on: https://ificantdance.studio/field-of-inquiry/forthcoming-intermediary; and written by
Anik Fournier
“These places of possibility within ourselves are dark, because they are ancient and hidden: they have survived and grown strong through that darkness. Within these deep places, each one of us holds an incredible reserve of creativity and power, of unexamined and unrecorded emotion and feeling. The woman’s place of power within each of us is neither white nor surface: it is dark, it is ancient and it is deep” - Audre Lorde in Uses of the Erotic.
Devika Chotoe with Anne Jesuina and Paula Montecinos
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Image: Anne Jesuina in Not Yet Here, But Always Been There), 2022, performance. Photo: Temra Pavlovic.
Not Yet Here, But Always Been There), 2022, performance. Photo: Temra Pavlovic.Within the context of her fellowship at If I Can’t Dance, Anne Jesuina and Devika were invited to intervene into artist patricia kaersenhout’s exhibition The Third Dimension at CBK Zuidoost. The exhibition consists of a selection of beautifully executed series of work, in a range of media and spanning several decades. The show highlight’s kaersenhout’s relentless commitment to retrieving forgotten and erased stories, showing how the bodies and lives of black women have been rendered invisible, or conversely, eroticised, in official histories and representations. Kaersenhout’s work reassembles existing images, materials and narratives, stitching and puzzling them into new imaginaries and narratives that reveal how history is malleable; it can be reformalized and rewritten so as to revisit the past in order to reconfigure understandings of the present.
Not Yet Here, But Always Been There), 2022, performance. Photo: Temra Pavlovic.
In the exhibition space of The Third Dimension, the intervention, Forthcoming (Not Yet Here, But Always Been There), moved these charged questions to the site of the body, where histories of colonialism and slavery remain in the form of embodied archives within diasporic communities. With her background in dance, choreography and writing, Devika collaborated with performance artist Anne Jesuina and choreographer and sound artist Paula Montecinos to create a space where their own stories, struggles and desires could be shared. For this, they darkened the exhibition space so that the images and narratives already present in kaersenhout’s exhibition became ghostly figures that conversed with the stories and soundscape of the performing bodies; bodies that carry ancestral histories directly tied to colonialism and migrant labour.
Interview
Soundscape
Not Yet Here, But Always Been There), 2022, performance. Photo: Temra Pavlovic.