Bl0Wn
Performance (1st iteration) at Tanzhaus, 2023
Performers: Josephine Baan and Luc Häfliger
Sound and music: Luc Häfliger
Photos by Sara Merz
Bl0Wn is a performance and research project in which I investigate the liberatory potential of performative practices and propose performance as a means to—individually and collectively—interrogate and negotiate the constraints that one is borne into. Departing from the prism of “becoming unrecognisable” as a methodology (or what Marquis Bey calls “(un)gendering”), Bl0Wn considers how becoming unrecognisable might offer the possibility of liberation from identitarian markers. By harnessing unrecognizability, illegibility, and incoherence as strategies to question and potentially abolish the constraints one is borne into (i.e. social & economic mobility, categories of citizenship & identity), the piece aims to interrogate and negotiate the limits of our given realities. The work directs the gaze of the audience by agentively choosing what to reveal and what to hide; through light and darkness, sound and noise, forms and textures, as well as performativity and the refusal to perform. Bl0Wn invites the unruliness of the body as a space for change; the performers change shape and affect throughout the work, attempting to undermine the constraints of identity and to play with the expectations and projections that bodies under scrutiny incite.
