A techno-ritual for escaping legibility, materialized in the form of an immersive video and audio environment.
Planned Irrelevance (2018) was created as a commissioned work for EXTRA+TERRESTRIAL, an exhibition by COVEN Berlin which explored the archetypes of the Alien, the Cyborg, the Witch and the Monster as intersectional sites of identification and reclamation for lesbians, bisexual and queer women. Presented at the Schwules* Museum in Berlin, the artwork consisted of four video channels displayed on individual video screens and bound together into a single panel. A spoken word audio track in English and German asks the viewer a series of meditative, open-ended questions, and the viewer is surrounded by a fabric shell, patterned with a water line above most viewers’ heads. On the video screens, asynchronous clips of five 3D-animated women living in a primarily aquatic environment with technological adaptations to aid their survival play, performing acts of care and intimacy through a utopian apocalypse. Referencing themes of climate change, planned obsolescence, and the irrelevance and disposability of queer women in a patriarchal culture, Planned Irrelevance speaks into being an cyborg ritual of community to facilitate our ability to carve out new spaces, and to shape-shift as necessary to keep ourselves safe.
