Shaky vessels

Shaky Vessels

30’’

W/ Rita Bifulco

Antwerp Queer Festival 2024, Residency Mimefabrik, De Ruimte X SexyWorld 2024, Club Church

How to queer of old pirate lifestyles and implement them into our current society?
We as a performative duo, have been feeling connected to the pirate life as a way to get out of a political mainstream, allowing our imagination to embody the imbalance of a vessel in the ocean, feeling isolated and lonely. Yet, one can not but sympathize with the pragmatism of the pirates against the dogmatism of their day. In Shaky Vessels, the movement quality of our bodies is unstable, disoriented, blinded by the light, shaken by the storms and intoxicated by life on the land. This movement quality is inhabiting the past, launching itself into the present, to restore drowned pirate legacies of rebellion, possession, fear, and new alternatives. Simultaneously, ‘Shaky Vessels’ is a practice that explores the gaze that mirrors distortion from the inner surfaces of the eyes, which sails out over the rest of the face as grimaces. We use these piratic metaphors in public space to question which thoughts are the main streams, and to interrogate the jurisdiction and authority in the locations we perform.
By allowing itself to memorize history, the body becomes able to activate or rewrite a narrative that is dominantly prejudiced, to unmask the different layers of madness present and to unfold hidden intentions of the space that can vary, across a continuum, to broaden queer perspectives of pirate legacies.