Rupture, @ the Esme Timbery Creative Practice Lab, UNSW, 31st October, 2019

Rupture, with Linda Dement & Virginia Barratt. Performance, Video & Sound Installation as part of the Big Anxiety Festival, UNSW, Studio One, Esme Timbery Creative Practice Lab (ETCPL), UNSW Kensington, NSW. 31st October, 2019.
"The shimmer-body takes up the excess, or the overflow, that which the body-in-the-world, constructed as it is by language, can’t mouth. The excess which no body in its right mind can speak, it is only possible to speak in this register when one is beside oneself.
The post linguistic arises always from the body beside itself (beside itself). Such a voice falling out of language and into the remainder could only arise from a body beside itself.
I leave my body behind
There are other doubles here: the panic body emerges out of the aria in breathy, breathless startles, a pack of panics, a shimmer of panic making pack sounds deep in the throat, throwing shapes at the abyss, deterritorialising and reterritorialising in a rapid cycle between high notes and low, between hope and hopelessness, between integrity and dissolution.
I often consider panic, or the productive energetics of panic to be an entity, a twinning of my body, a shimmer-double, a constant companion. Panic, the creep living in your crawlspace, the co-dependant companion you never see, keeping strange hours. The absence that is always a palpable presence. The darkened corridors, the clinging ghosts of night.
How does this body speak? And does my body speak at the same time as my shimmer-double speaks?" ------- Virginia Barratt
'Rupture' investigates the ways in which the body and the world mimic each other in modes of panic and crisis. Through a performance of vocalities and gestures sited within a multi-channel video and sound installation, this work interprets how symptoms of environmental and human ‘disorder’ can be seen as an appropriate response to personal traumas and global catastrophe.
Rupture and its iterative manifestations was born of an interdisciplinary and collaborative process bringing together photo, video and sound artist Jessie Boylan, researcher, writer and performer Virginia Barratt, digital media artist Linda Dement and trauma-informed psychotherapist Jenna Tuke.
The work explores - through the politics of vulnerability - how panic and anxiety, often underpinned by personal and collective grief, pain, anger, loss, trauma, has a “palpable extension in the world” (J. Bennett). The work asks us how to stay with the trouble (D. Haraway) of our catastrophic times
In our current age of anxiety, we are constantly called to attention by present, imminent and hypothetical environmental and psychological ‘ruptures’. Anxiety as a warning system becomes faulty through this constant triggering, hypersensitizing a population - not just at a bodily level, but also at a social and global ecological level - to messages of danger and catastrophe. Quakes reverberate across fleshbodies and geobodies, send ripples through everything at a quantum level. The body in/of the world floods, buckles, trembles, spews, generates toxic pools, fractures.
When anxiety exceeds its own capacity as a productive force, it becomes difficult to stay with the trouble. All systems are telling you to flee. Rupture asks us:
“do we stop in our tracks, ‘overwhelmed’ turn our faces from a sun that is swallowing us whole, walk blindfolded and alone towards the crumbling ochre cliffs? Or can we find accomplices to walk with us, to make some sense of the catastrophic present, and then use this awareness to resist paralysis, to cast off despair” - Francesca Da Rimini
In staying with the trouble can we work together with the dead and dying, can we hold the pain of the earth/body but reconfigure the traumas beneath the surface to move us on from stasis.