room to bloom
performance
room to bloom was made for EQO, a mini festival at Roodkapje in Rotterdam gathered around the crossroads of queerness and nature, where climate justice and queer emancipation were held to strengthen one another. Within that frame the performance took shape as a duet between two voices, built on a poem the two of them wrote together and then spoke in fragments, one moving down to up and the other up to down, until the text read less as a script than as a single body with two nervous systems.
Sound came from instruments they had made themselves in ceramic, played alongside field recordings, so that the clay became both sculpture and voice. The premise underneath was a system that makes and maintains itself out of its own parts, and the performance pressed on the tension of being such a system, at once producing and undoing oneself. What it opened towards was a set of new material kinships, ways of belonging that run through the porous and shared substance of bodies rather than around it.
The poem gives the work its texture, visceral and close to the skin. It moves through paper fibres and collagen, gut bacteria and found eggshells, curtain cords knotted against the speed of the world, and it keeps circling the same becoming, the passage from one state to another and the otherness that comes with it. It ends where the whole piece seems to want to arrive, with a cell that has learned to become free, a small declaration of a self made and remade on its own soft terms.