“[…] queerness exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future. The future is queerness’s domain.” (Muñoz, 2019).
As a performer recently engaged with queer theology, I crave for queer sacred places in Christianity. Marcella Althaus-Reid, in her book “The Queer God”, challenges what she refers to as "T-Theology"; "a totalitarian construction of what is considered 'The One and Only Theology' which does not admit discussions or challenges from different perspectives, especially in the area of sexual identity and its close relationship with political and racial issues." (2003). To question the Grand Narratives of Christianity is to prompt possibilities of Christian queerness, generating hope. According with the queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz, even if hope can be disappointed in terms of queer futurity, it is “[w]ithin [that] failure we can locate a kernel of potentiality. [Queer failure] helps the spectator [to] exit from the stale and static lifeworld dominated by the alienation, exploitation, and drudgery associated with capitalism or landlordism.” (2019). Thus, the longing for queer sacred Christian places is part of this queer utopia that criticizes past and present to prompt paths to the future.
Within this mindset, one of my first experiments in the “Interplaces” elective aimed to create an imaginative space in between me and the other. For that, I recorded an audio describing my room with metaphors for the sensations I feel when I see the texture of the walls. I talk about my unhappiness with some details of the room, and externale the joys I have with my housemates. After recording, I mixed the timeline order, creating a non-linear description. By not showing images of my room, I incite the listener to create an imaginative space. Whoever listens to my audio interpretates my words accordingly to their life experiences and translates my speech in imaginative images. The space in between is an ongoing dialogue.
Hereafter, some questions remained in my thoughts: How to create a space through conversations? How to describe a space and yet talk about myself, my social location and my desires? How to place myself? Inspired by these questions, a collaboration with the artist Laís Rosa has emerged. She is a friend of mine; a Brazilian white cis woman researching the potentiality of walking as a micro-revolution, an educational act, and an attempt to find herself. Nowadays, we are both in different European countries to do our master’s degrees. We share the desire to map our conversations in order to situate ourselves in space, in time, and the ‘in between us’. Together, we decided to interview one another through walking scores. We wanted to embody a walk together despite our distance, given the covid-19 pandemic state.
Taking in account that walks can be ‘ethical actions’ to recognize one’s “specific location within a wider network” (Springgay, Truman, 2017), the walking scores aimed to propose a question in which the other had to situate herself. According to the Botswana feminist theologian Musa W. Dube, social location is complex, because “it involves gender, ethnicity, race, national, international, class, and health status. [It also involves] several institutions such as family, church, and university.” (2007). All this complex network can empower or disempower someone, allow one to speak or to be silenced. It affects our experiences and our readings. That said, the score answer through a walk and its documentation, rather by a written chronicle or an audio recording, reveals several aspects of our social location. Different social groups walk differently, i.e., one’s relation to the space cannot be a universalized claim; this would be to make invisible “historical and spatial sedimentations of power” (Springgay, Truman, 2017). Therefore, our way to walk and to relate to the space already reveals social aspects about us.
Another important element associated with Dube’s notion of social location is how it influences our experiences and readings. This perspective suggests that the text, and in our case the score, is always passive to different readings, which breaks the idea of a universal correct interpretation. Laís and I were interested in the micro acts of breaking the scores’ rules and what makes us break them. This act of transforming the score through the walk and its documentation is influenced by our life experiences, and emotional state; it is also a component to situate ourselves. Gathering these initial parameters, we have written and performed the scores. To check them and their respective documentations, click here.
Even though we are not interviewing ourselves presently in the same space, the exchange of our scores sets a question-answer scenario. The co-founders of the WalkingLab, Stephanie Springgay and Sarah E. Truman, argue that “walking interviews and walking practices shape a relational understanding of place” due the integration of our bodies with the perception of the environment through movement, which means that by walking we articulate “body and space co-extensively”. In that sense, “bodies and place are co-extensive to one another and co-produced through walking (2017). This co-production of body and space is also extended to the walk’s documentations because they set different experiences of place than the walking ones. The chronicle and the video-audio are what links our experience of place with the readers or listeners' imaginative experience of place. At the same time, they are what unlinks these different places, given that the walk and the reading or listening does not happen in the same space. This linked/unlinked situation is the intersection in between self and other. The sound and the words extend the body beyond themselves.
When you read the text or hear the audio, you are walking with us instead of reading and listening about our walks. However, you are not having the same experience of place, one because you are not there, and secondly because you are imagining a third space according with your own experience, your social location. What happens here is an embodied assemblage of spaces through a relational walk. Therefore, walking is a powerful way of communicating because it opens a space of dialogue and embodies knowledge.
This assemblage phenomenon can be related to Springgay and Truman's transmaterial approach to walk. ‘Trans’ focus on movement. ‘Transing’ is not going from a fixed location to another, but it is a practice that takes place within, across and between gendered spaces (2017). This act of transing is also very present in the movement in between the conversations of our walking scores, as well as in my translation of Laís’ audio because it is an interpretation of my sensations and imaginative spaces while listening to her audio. Moreover, the way I choose to translate, respecting the blank spaces and the drifting of the audio, makes space for a movement of thoughts as an embodiment of her walk. The immateriality of words and sounds are what embodies the materiality of the relation between bodies and spaces.
After engaging with this process, I have realized how many micro-revolutionary aspects a relational walk can have. Besides the queer and trans theories, and the potential of a critical acknowledgement of our social location, the time a walk takes, as well as the chronicle and the audio-video, is a statement against the capitalistic time of production. The boringness and extension of the documentations are not worried to be dynamic in order to capture attention to a product. It is with this embodiment conversation that challenges hegemonic patrons, or at least expose them, that I want to follow experimenting in my research.
References
ALTHAUS-REID, M. (2003). The queer God. Routledge, London; New York.
DUBE, Musa W. (2007).Who Do You Say That I Am?. Feminist Theology, 15: 346–367.
MUÑOZ, J. E., PELLEGRINI, A., CHAMBERS-LETSON, J. T., & NYONG'O, T. (2019). Cruising Utopia: the then and there of queer futurity. <https://www.overdrive.com/search?q=2E36D773-92E3-4633-97D7-26AB8BD94051>.
SPRINGGAY, S., & TRUMAN, S. E. (2017). A Transmaterial Approach to Walking Methodologies: Embodiment, Affect, and a Sonic Art Performance. Body & Society. 23, 27-58.