I was first introduced to this work by Guillermo Gomez-Pena back in 2017 when I attended a week long performance intensive residency at the Tetley gallery. It was a combination of bringing South Asian performance artists from India, Bangladesh and Pakistan and the UK to form a group and a bond to inform each-other’s work. It was a transformative time that radically changed everything I knew and thought about knowledge, and how performance could be used as a tool to unlock epistemologies of the body. I am reflecting on these works I made, and how this literature underpins my practice as an educator as well.
Weaving as a methodology, as a tool to use ‘un-weaving’ as a strategy to undo models of production/productivity, and re-situate the disabled body, and the racialised body so bound up with labours it cannot remove itself from. To spend 10hours weaving, building a loom, using the body as a loom, only to not produce cloth for any purpose or function. What does it mean to exist in this world and feel like your gender is unfunction, how trauma disables the body; the same body is a living archive, a geography of pain and trigger points. The body is a site of production. Resist resist resist.
It was this environment that fostered each of us in that workshop to let go, to fiercely critique racism, borders, language, archives, power imbalances. It led me to re establish thinking through the body and thinking through weaving – weaving as a performance, labour as a performance, and the link between the archival body and trauma/disability in people of colour and queer people. The legacy of that knowledge. I now try to harness this energy with my own teaching, and hope I can root some of these ideas with how I can work in person with students once we can be in person once again. These methodologies in performance always lead me to think that teaching is about sharing yourself, your energy and fostering this very clear and safe environment for discussion to take hold. This tenet of pedagogy – to create spaces for voices, discussion and an exchange of ideas – critical and enquiring, to provide a platform for students to discuss and speak, and maybe speak through their bodies.