KISS ME, GENTLEMEN – IN PURSUIT OF REALNESS

"I Am Not A Man, Not Now," a Single Channel Video, 9 Minutes, Live Performance, made in 2012 by APT artist Elise Rasmussen with Chelsea Knight will be screening at UnionDocs as part of the program Kiss Me, Gentlemen - In Pursuit of Realness, curated by Minou Norouzi, on September 4 at 7:30PM.

In this piece, Elise Rasmussen and Chelsea Knight explore Antigone in its references to the roles of women in ancient Greece. They read the play as both proto-feminist and misogynous, where the protagonist engages in acts of brave civil disobedience, but is also used as an example of a stereotypical feminine tendency to feel rather than think. Rasmussen and Knight seek to draw attention to the way language is used against women in the play, its loss and gain of intention through time through translation, and its relevance today.

I Am Not A Man, Not Now is a collaborative performance and video made with Chelsea Knight in which we direct scenes from Sophocles’ Antigone that refer to the roles of women in ancient Greece, roles of subjugation that are in many ways still fully recognizable in the modern world. In this story of a woman committing an act of civil disobedience against the state, social roles and prejudices are substantiated through concepts such as fate and the will of the gods. In this performance and video, we seek to re-cast those roles in terms of language and its translation, its loss and gain of intention through time, choosing a contemporary translation of the play by Robert Fagles, performed by David Margulies, and older translations performed by three Antigones. The piece explores Antigone as both a proto-feminist play, and a misogynistic one, highlighting the comparison of the texts to show the subjective nature of translation.

Our bodies belong to others; parents first, then lovers. A mother’s body belongs to her child. We are subjected to education systems; consumer desires demand to be satisfied through contracts of labor. Our bodies belong to institutions; institutions for criminals, the sick, and the insane; institutions in the end too, for all of us, via the medical, care, and funerary systems.

When we agree to participate in films, our bodies belong to the filmmaker. A contractual agreement places the image, sound – and by metaphorical extension – the body, in the ownership of the filmmaker. Its care is entangled with the politics of filmic history and filmic experience. The filmmaker’s own body is also invested, navigating space, time, and the ‘contaminated projections’ of their own ideologies. As we watch carefully, or repeatedly, our knowledge may be ruptured, our feelings disturbed.

In one way or another all the films in this program deal with the mechanisms and technologies of entrapment: the destitute body, the incarcerated body, the body as a self-replicating system, bodies of soldiers performing military rituals, Greek mythology made contemporary through performative acts of defiance. Strategies in the pursuit of ‘realness’ range from injecting humor; others incite horror, follow a performative impulse, or straddle precariously on the ethical tightrope of representation. All point powerfully towards the condition of embodied subjects that have become specular, schizoid, internally disjointed.

Selected by Minou Norouzi, filmmaker and programmer, doctoral candidate at Goldsmiths, University of London.