performingborders newsletter | February 2023

Hello and welcome to 2023 with performingborders!

We’re so excited to open 2023 with a new performance-to-camera commission Puzzling Home 家的形狀 by Ghost and John, Michael and Jane. In this new performance to camera we see two travelers arrive home to a sandy beach, carrying with them visions of their former lives. In the work, these memories are revisited, mismatched, and misaligned to form an image of “home”. For those in a seemingly constant process of departure and arrival, it is a work that speaks to these fragments we hold of our memories and identities. This work was curated and commissioned in collaboration with Queer Art Projects.

WATCH Puzzling Home 家的形狀 HERE

We’re also happy to share that as of February 2023 the collective mother tongues is in residency with performingborders, where they will be thinking with us on archives, language, performance and the body. We look forward to sharing the conversations, dialogue, and research to come from this collaboration. To read more about this please see the separate announcement here.

This year we’re also launching our first radio series performingborders Radio with Montez Press Radio, which will be airing bi-monthly. We’ll be exploring the entanglement between Live Art and notions and lived experiences of intersectional and transnational borders. We opened this series in January 2023 with three listening rituals by Ximena Alarcón-Díaz, which were originally commissioned for performingborders’ annual e-Journal #2: Rallying the Commons, published 14th December 2022. In this re-release of the rituals, we tell you more about this new radio series and hear more from Ximena about the rituals and her practice after the creation of the work. Our next episode will be live on Montez Press Radio on the 30th of March.

LISTEN TO THE FIRST EPISODE OF performingborders Radio HERE

you can also check out the show on Montez Press Radio here (through a global playlist)

We also want to share some new updates to our e-journal: Rallying the Commons, which we launched in December last year. This month we have added an Arabic translation of the text Dayra and Communal Debt by Lara Khaldi on behalf of The Question of Funding. Image-audio descriptions have also been added to all of the works in Harun Morrison’s visual essay How raised flowerbeds raise questions: Notes on ‘The Anchor, The Drum, The Ship’. If you didn’t catch the e-journal in our last newsletter, take a dive into its second iteration where we explore the process of rallying together, of commoning and communing, for the creation of something better and the maintenance of other ways of being.

READ Rallying the Commons HERE

At the end of last year we also shared SPIRAL Open Archive by PartSuspended collective. We wanted to re-share it in this newsletter so you could enjoy the creations of this ongoing performance art project that unites women’s voices in an exchange of languages, cultures, and personal narratives.

READ SPIRALS Open Archive HERE

That’s all for now! We hope you’re all having a good beginning to this cycle.

CHECK OUT THE FULL NEWSLETTER HERE.

Image credits: Stills from Puzzling Home 家的形狀 (2023) by Ghost and John, Michael and Jane. Commissioned by performingborders and Queer Art Projects.