Kiss my Offal Hole

The ethical responsibility of a viewer isn't invisible. Viewing can seem passive: consume, binge and regurgitate. Due to collective exhaustion, this rarely creates a pocket to reckon our habits and hungers. It collects under our fingernails, clogs our pores and knots up muscles between the shoulder blade and spine. About 40 minutes before this performance was scheduled to start I was viewing RNZ’s Instagram story, where I was met with the headline ‘West Coast companies sentenced after workers collapse in toxic gas pit’. Since The Ethics of Witnessing [ROT] I found my eyes re-tuned and skin itchier. The image of an ominous hole was presented with the headline and bled into how I witnessed this performance. The atmosphere and space was abject and itself became a toxic gas pit where it was found and left to bleed out. 

A drink is yanked from a witness, sipped on, and dropped. Spilling onto the floor, Ys Blue acts as both agitator and connector between performance and audience. They swing between blankish internal meditations to swift intimate exchanges. A bubblegum pink Mac lipstick becomes both a weapon and object of desire, with witnesses invited to hold or have the lipstick applied in intimate and forward ways, implicating the witness in the objectification of not just Blue but themselves. A feeling of wanting to witness but also begging not be called upon grows. The clouds from a bandaged vape create casual intervals throughout Blue’s performance, distilling the tension. I return later to find Blue straddling and applying lipstick to the bouncer. In this moment the question grows beyond the human witnesses to the space as a witness. Can this threshold be secured? What negotiation does it take to uphold or undermine it? The bouncer, once dismounted, returns to the door. 

A deteriorating white vinyl salon chair sits facing the corner; slashes on its arms exposing a fleshy red interior. Fetishini is a mutant epidermis layered with latex, stockings and bandaged earmuffs, insulating them from the surrounding environment—a once calloused heel soaked in the bath too long. Creaking movements morph into a shedding reveal, a surprise element common in drag performance, here executed with much more struggle and the reveal of an even more puncturable surface. The hard line that separates the end of us to the beginning of everything is the fragile skin, the largest organ our body has. My own body has abscesses from binding which are routinely taped over and over. In comparing body/scape and land/scape it can be easy to focus on the shared physical qualities, but the emotional potential of non-human worlds are held in purulent pores, debris filled ditches and shoreline rocks with sharp edges from impact. 

Blue then takes to sewing Fetishini limb by limb into the chair. As though a nightmare has become reality, each time the skin is pinched and punctured presents a fresh risk, a new wound. This procedure that skin could only ever heal from with time, care, and resources leaves Fetishini unable to move and less human for their new attachment. Celebrated with attention from the witnesses during the trauma but left to exist thereafter. 

Kat Lang’s role, much like Blues stitching of Fetishini, is painful but necessary. I’d popped my head in and found Lang focused, their movements like that of a scientist inventing their way through time. Brash but rhythmic contact mics in the loo and hand basin. My body adjusts to the space and I remove my earplugs, wanting to be pierced with as much intensity aurally as I was visually. The performers were putting so much of themselves on the line I figured it was only fair. Cups unified the three separate performances and kept the atmosphere septic and mutating. 

Chloe Jaques’ isolation in the back room creates tension with the proximity of the other three performers. There was a choice of how to witness each part—I can’t say I followed any logic except impulse, which felt appropriate. Clear plastic tubes fed out of bags of blood, strung up to the ceiling and back towards Jaques’ body laying on a plastic drop cloth. Blood as a mark of trauma gets me thinking about periods past, pimples picked till sore, my mum's heart attack.

Towards the end Jaques is clotting with eyes wide—the bleed out has finished, their body rigid and the environment, warmed by those of the witnesses, smells as gruesome as it looks. This stillness is interrupted by the wall behind me banging and shaking. I escaped to see Blue had pierced the gib rock with their heels embedded in the wall. Finally, sitting outside the door where Lang continues to build a sonic wall, Blue pisses on the floor as the audience encircles them. At this moment it doesn't feel like the control Blue had during the performance is available to them. Joining Lang in the bathroom and slamming the door concludes the performance. 

My interest in performance is partially due to it being one of the least penetrable mediums of art for capitalistic dilution, its immediacy and then its dissolution. Horror as a genre isn’t something I am drawn to much as I find it can overlook the monstrosity of reality and exhausts an already tight bandwidth my emotion can handle, but after leaving the performance I was highly alert. Feeling better and worse than before, I felt I’d spewed out something; mouth feeling gross but stomach relieved. Decay leaves space for something beyond it. It holds potential to be the shit that fertilizes whatever's next.

Elvis Booth-Claveria (Pakeha, Chilean), raised in Te Papaioea Palmerston North, Manawatū, and now based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington. Their work is interested in performance, video, sculpture and installation. Centred around ideas of queer identity, body-environment relationships,organic materiality and informed by their positionality as a queer trans Pākehā in Aotearoa. Animistic theory is a key element in their work, offering a non-hierarchical lens to explore their colonial and queer identity.