The following text was co-commissioned as a part of our Live Art Writers Network (LAWN) at Fierce Festival in October 2024. This programme worked with three Birmingham-based writers: Harmanpreet Randhawa, Rupinder Kaur, and Leah Hickey to generate creative critical responses to the festival context. LAWN is a network aimed at cultivating experimental writing practices happening in dialogue with performance and live art, find out more about LAWN here.

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Listen to the text:

Voiceover done by Harmanpreet Randhawa’s artist-collaborator Ella Soni.

Drawing on recent research and the creation of a new performance work, NaMa Lum, alongside moments from the festival, this text offers a fragmented response to Fierce Festival 2024. Recognising the boundaries of language my reflections extend into a collage and a tracklist meditating on the body that is always shifting, without a master/self, (dis)integrating into all and none and re-making itself.

If I knew, would I still be writing it?
-Ashkan Sepahvand

Language is a limit masked as a medium.
A limit on the body
Introjected. Swallowed.

_{Harmanpreet Randhawa, “NaMa Lum/The one who does not know”, 2024, The Old Fire Station Oxford, image by Mark Devereux ¹}

I stay with this; imagining a beginning at the end of language

Where

the body

takes over.

Limbs folded over other limbs. Others’ limbs. Holding together. Pulling apart.

“a continuous creation, the body, ONE BODY, which is never a complete structure; never static; is in perpetual inner self-construction and self-destruction” (Brown, 1990:155)

When language itself feels like a form of self-mastery, I turn to (mis)translation into an other/ the (m)Other’s speech — seeking meanings to uproot language from its fixed roots and bring the body to the forefront.

A diasporic practice.

In Punjabi, the word for tomorrow and yesterday is the same:

Kal (ਕੱ ਲ੍ਹ)

Its roots also run along Kaal (काल) in Hindi, signifying time, doomsday or darkness and in my imagination perhaps even Kaal ( Bare or more informally Bare Arsed) in Afrikaans.

From yesterday and tomorrow, I return back to the timeless body. Bare. Stripped of coverings. Like the body in Harald Beharie’s Bawtty Boy. Exposed. Sensing his way around through the hole.

The figure of Kali (काली) also feels pertinent here. A dark fem body wearing garlands of severed heads and a skirt of human arms.

The creator and the destroyer. The creator hence the destroyer.

Often depicted with her tongue outstretched, the image of the gooning^₂ Kali is one that kept returning to me when seeing bodies hypnotised by their own carnality at Fierce. Kali, consumed entirely by the heat of her body, dances the dance of destruction after vanquishing Raktabija. She loses herself—forgetting even Shiva, her husband, and the pleas of those begging her to stop. Her thirst for bodily surrender becomes so boundless that she is willing to consume and destroy her own body to quench it.

^{Entephul, Alina Arshi, image by Manuel Vason}

Alina Arshi brought this vision to life at Fierce. Biting, swallowing, and gooning over her own form, Arshi revealed an orienting practice that doesn’t rely on language—a practice that abstains from it entirely, as the mouth and tongue are too consumed with devouring the body itself. Seeking roots/routes between the weaving of the fabrics and seeming noises from the streets of India Arshi reimagines the diasporic body not as lacking something but rather a manifestation of boundless erotics of longing and longing for erotics.

A body without a ‘self,’ and therefore without a master. Embodying the universal truth: oneness.”

‘Ik Oankaar’ (ੴ) in Gurmukhi

‘Om’ (ॐ) in Sanskrit

The ‘hum’ that binds us all with what we now have othered. Humkara (हुम्कर) literally translates to “the sound of ‘Hum'” or “the utterance of the sound Hum”.

A cosmic vibration.

My speculation and desire also went to Hunkar (ਹੰ ਕਾਰ) in Punjabi which can roughly translate to pride or excessive ego. The word traces a possible path to the moment before the boundaries of the body—internal and external—were drawn, before the construction of the ‘self,’ before the ‘I’:

“Originally the ego includes everything, later it detaches from itsef the external world. The ego-feeling we are aware of now is thus only a shrunken vestige of a far more extensive feeling – a feeling which embraced the universe and expressed an inseparable connection of the ego with the external world” (Brown, 1990:141)

Humkara in this sense could be read as the omnipresent ego. And Kali perhaps the embodiment of it. Of oneness.

Of shedding the internal/external boundaries and beginning at the end and ending at the beginning.

Of standing before matter and becoming it.

I see a rock, but I am also the rock.

^{Jeremy Nedd, from rock to rock …aka how magnolia was taken for granite, image by Philip Frowein}

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Throughout the Fierce week I have been writing sentences/words, taking photos and doing quick sketches/scores of bodies/spaces/movements. Thoughts that come and go and return again because they never really left in the first instance. Knowledge that is forgotten by the mind but embodied through a history of movement of bodies. Of displacement.

Dis-placement. Dis-place-ment.

‘this place meant something’ is a scanned drawing/collage composed out of these notes/images/scores.

The marks that make language and gestures that mark the limits of mine, turned into fragments of tracing paper bare/ layered/incomplete/awkward/nonsensical like the body.

I draw lines on them with a ruler connecting, dissecting, showing, and concealing, add images from the festival. A new landscape emerges, conclusive of shattered words and phrases floating like islands.

^{this place meant something, 2024, scanned collage drawing}

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Fierce was a sonic experience. Whether it be the music I was listening to in the shower, cycling to the festival or sounds that emanated from the performances and the city.

With this in mind/ body/things in between and beyond and recognising the limits of language in responding to live art. I have also put togther a tracklist to disintegrate the self to. Composed of mainly electronic sounds I imagine this tracklist as an invitation to move. Dissolve.

Re-make. The ‘self’ and the body.

To feel, whether in stillness or movement and becoming it.

Where Tessela’s C’mon let’s slow dance births a dissonant reality, Birmingham-based techno pioneer Surgeon’s repetitive 4/4 progressions lead us into a trance state, rooted in techno’s

utopian imaginations—a “utopia in the present” as performance studies scholar Muñoz might call it. The struggles of speech in Arisha’s Entephul echo through Animistic Belief’s Call of

Tahuri, where a language begins to form, only to dissolve in reverberating, joyous and ritualistic echoes and bass, felt deeply in the body.

Animistic Beliefs – Call of Tahuri

Messy kafha world – Donato Dozzy Estrange – Shed

Azifiziks (d8) – Actress

All The Stolen Land of Palestine – Muslimgauze

C’mon Let’s Slow Dance – Tessela

Returning to the Purity of Current – Surgeon

Jade – Rod Modell

You can also listen to a longer and ever-evolving version of this tracklist on Spotify here

Footnotes:

1. NaMa Lum/The one of who does not know was realised upon invitation from Saroj Patel to perform at the closing event of her solo exhibition at The Old Fire Station. The performance was an embodied exploration of the speech/language through stimulation of the body of speech: the tongue, throat and the mouth.
2. By Urban Dictionary definition “Gooning” refers to the act of becoming completely self-absorbed with masturbation, such that your face and mannerisms takes on the personality of a goon:tongue out, vacant expression, grunting, muttering. My reading of the gooner is of one who has abstained from speech/language as we know it and is absorbed and moved entirely by the desirous body.

Reference List:
Munoz, Jose E. 2009. Cruising Utopias: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, New York: NYU Press.
O’Brown, Norman. 1990. Love’s Body. California: University of California
Sepahvand, Ashkan. 2022. ‘The Present in the Past’, Qalqalah [online]. Accessed on 1st December 2024. https://qalqalah.org/en/research-diaries/the-present-in-the-past

Performances cited:
Entenpfuhl, Alina Arshi
from rock to rock …aka how magnolia was taken for granite, Jeremy Nedd
Batty Bwoy, Harald Beharie

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Harmanpreet Randhawa is an artist working across sculpture, writing, drawing, installation and most recently, performance. Oscillating between the domestic and the sensual, their practice employs material-oriented approaches exploring the complexities of longing, belonging and desire through an autoethnographic lens.

LAWN is commissioned by performingborders, FIERCE Festival, Take Me Somewhere, CITEMOR, and METAL Culture, and it is supported with funds by Arts Council England and Necessity Fund.