The Creature of Water Walking on Land
In this short piece Daisy Wang explores posthuman feminist relations in becoming mallard. Daisy is a current Master of Research in Architecture student at the Royal College of Art.
Behind the wall of flesh,
Behind the bars of bone.
I saw a seed,
A seed stands for all thing beautiful and brave,
And for shame and sorrow.
Is there a little girl?
Dancing in the seed, dancing at the center of the oceanic water.
No, it is not a girl, it is a mallard.
A mallard, looking for her lost speculum feathers,
Looking for part of her body.
She left her associated milieu to explore land, forced to stand on her own legs,
Now carrying water on the inside,
Dancing in the oceanic water of her mother’s womb.
Based on the feminist phenomenology and queer phenomenology, mainly inspired by the book of Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology, I realised how important feminist theory and gender studies can be for developing the environmental humanities and posthumanism. I want to join those who are bridging these disciplines with the Anthropocene, where difference and connection are also material, and connected to hydrological, geological, and other kinds of environmental movements.
After visiting the exhibition ‘Liquid A Place’ curated by architect Torkwase Dyson, where she said, ‘I can drink the distance’, I feel fully touched, it pushes me to think further of water as a space of resistance, liberation, terror, conflict, oppression, refuge, extraction and pollution. Dyson also perceives drawing as an expanded field, and as a capacity to absorb all notions of space. These two together make me reconsider ‘liquid a space’ as a happening and some ongoingness related nowadays some political issue around freedom and space.
LCD (liquid crystal display) TV, as a metaphor. In the book Liquid Crystals: the science and art of a fluid form, Esther Leslie discusses that we live in the wake of liquid crystal screens. They appeal to us, as they reconstitute us. As Leslie write, ‘[t]hese liquid crystal screens, networked, slosh data between themselves in endless acts of digital liquidity.’ It allows me to think further about how we deal with the relationship between human, nature and technology as we enter the era of Artificial Intelligence.
All this flowed into an initial idea about doing a performance by using the female body as a medium. Then I decided to conduct a performance and also to make a short film to express the concept of my personal research. For the performance’s references, I am mainly looking at the exhibition named ‘The Squash’ curated by the artist Anthea Hamilton and performance Scorpion 2021 made by Zadie Xa. Inspired by the book Speculum of the Other Woman by Luce Irigaray, I transform the concept ‘speculum’ into ‘speculum feather’ which I am looking for when I dream about becoming a mallard.
From my perspective, ‘speculum’ is not only a tool, but more like a way to observe inner body. Influenced by the performance artist Marcus Coates and painter Monster Chetwynd, I try to develop my costume further. Thinking of multiple meanings of the site which fit into my research, I eventually chose the site of Princess Diana Memorial Fountain to present my performance. As it is a place to grieve what we lost, it can also parallel to lament for animals as well.
In the shadows of my performance’s beings lurks something otherworldly, a sombre hint of another reality. Yet the landscape it seemingly inhabits is an imagined cultural representation of the world we find ourselves in today. What I’m looking for could be a new way to observe and understand the connection among female body, water and space especially when we are facing more and more ecological crisis.
