Untitled (borders, queer camo) (2017)
Performance - three disruptive iterations in different areas of the Chicago Cultural CenterIn/habit roving art series at
the Chicago Cultural Center
July 2017
Borders are the arbitrary and violent lines of a colonial grid, playground demarcations of Nation-States, enforced by the military institution. Playing with the loaded
pattern of camouflage, this interruptive performance also calls in queer aesthetics as a potential weapon to question “Nature”/hierarchy and the state of fight/combat and survival/camouflage of queer, colonial subjects.
This was a performative curatorial statement for InLine II, a performance, dance, video, new media and sound event about lines of power and translation organized by Mitsu Salmon & Rebecca Ladida
InLine II detailed program
About InLine II
A line connects or separates, extends or contains.
A line can be a manifestation of power, a border (who draws the line), a response (establishing boundaries between bodies and body politic).
A line is a decision; a line is an object of conflict. The Chicago Cultural Center is a historic and cultural landmark which is the city'sofficial reception venue where the Mayor of Chicago has welcomed Presidents and royalty, diplomats and community leaders. Playing with and questioning the grandeur and display of power that the space represents we have invited artists who “do not cut the line” instead to investigate these lines of power, place and the body. Traversing the 4th floor, the artists of InLine are performing these lines through different mediums. By moving a line from paper to the body, to a screen and so on, the line -the form’s meaning- layers and becomes more complicated with each reiteration. We can think of these echoes as translation processes. InLine is therefore about both translation and lines of power, about 'keeping in line', within the limits of our social positions. It is about processes of identifications and disidentifications, and the languages available to us to do so. It is about the unavoidable trespassing that occurs when one expands beyond these boundaries.
