Your Rage is
Sacred (maa)
Details
29 February 2024
19:00
FormaHQ
140 Great Dover Street
SE1 4GW, London
Your Rage is Sacred (maa) was conceived with the support of Arts Council England, Goldsmiths College, Generation Delta, Goldsmiths CCA, Trans Dimension, Ugly Duck and Forma.
Your Rage is Sacred (maa)
Clémentine Bedos & collaborators
29 February, 19:00 - 22:00
Clémentine Bedos discusses their latest immersive performance Your Rage is Sacred (maa) with Forma’s Antonia Shaw and collaborators Eunjo Lee, Seyi Adelekun, Chooc Ly Tan, Mohammed Rowe, Abhaya Rajani, Eleni Papazoglou, Finchittida Finch, Sibahle Serpent and Janhavi Sharma.
Performed for the first time in November of 2023 at Goldsmiths Sonics Immersive Media Lab (SIML), Your Rage is Sacred (maa) is the realisation of Bedos’ doctoral research, Techno-Tantrik Embodiment: Navigating Oppression and Resistance Through the Creolisation of Ancestral and Emerging Technologies. Drawing on their cross-cultural heritage and experience, Bedos brings disparate ideas and cosmologies into conversation. “Creolising” holistic practices like meditative visualisations, breathwork, mantra and movement with modern tools like real-time 3D creation, 360 projection, and surround sound, this project explores epistemic frictions between apparatuses which belong to and emerge from different visual regimes.
The performance explored the spiritual aesthetics of Tantra to delve into the body – divine instrument of perception and karmic archive – and conjure rage as a catalyst for personal and collective transformation.
In their discussion, Bedos and their collaborators will touch upon the entangled agencies and complex web of solidarities that a work like Your Rage is Sacred (maa) enacts. They will reflect on their experience of making the work, as well as discussions surrounding technology as cultural practice, and the extractive nature of imperial logic/colonial praxis manifested in emerging technologies, Tantra as an ancestral science, and the parallels between the divine feminine of Śakta Tantra and Ifa (West Africa).
In addition to the discussion Bedos’ and their collaborators will also share with us a short reenactment of the performance, centering audience testimonies.
Clémentine Bedos, Your Rage is Sacred (maa), a live discussion at FormaHQ in collaboration with Finchittida Finch, Eunjo Lee, Chooc Ly, Eleni Papazoglou, Abhaya Rajani, Mohammed Rowe, and Sibahle Serpent. 2024. Image courtesy of the artist and Forma. Photo: Forma.
Clémentine Bedos, Your Rage is Sacred (maa), a live discussion at FormaHQ in collaboration with Finchittida Finch, Eunjo Lee, Chooc Ly, Eleni Papazoglou, Abhaya Rajani, Mohammed Rowe, and Sibahle Serpent. 2024. Image courtesy of the artist and Forma. Photo: Forma.
Further context
The research for this new work has involved fieldwork at a site significant to Tantrik cosmology, the Ambubachi Mela in Guwahati, North-East India, a festival in celebration of the menstruation of the Earth Goddess Maa Kamakhya. The festival takes place during the monsoon season, when the water from an underground spring runs red with iron-oxide from the soil, flowing over the ‘yoni’ as if the goddess is menstruating. Described in ancient texts as the centre of Tantra, the Ambubachi mela evidences the ways in which Tantra challenges Western cultural distinctions between purity and impurity by embracing the taboo as part of its cosmology and the natural rhythms of the landscape.
Alongside this fieldwork, ‘Your Rage is Sacred (maa)’ is informed by Bedos’ facilitation of Kali Kula, a community of seekers engaged in spiritual praxis toward collective sustenance and the creation of networks of care and solidarity for bodies of colour. Together, we co-create a healing and transgressive container to feel our repressed emotions and refine our inner tools of perception. We learn to see beyond our blind spots and shift limiting scripts inherited from hetero-colonial patriarchy by cultivating the radical power of contemplation and imagination. Through that process of shedding skin, we return to the womb - the belly of the universe - and repose in the ultimate peaceful ground of our being.
Thus 'Your Rage is Sacred (maa)' seeks to extend these transformative practices to a wider audience through multidimensional performance. To express taboo emotions is to become fugitive to the normative regime of our oppressive lifeworlds.
Artist Biography Clémentine Bedos is a London-based transdisciplinary artist. Their research-led practice explores the interrelated phenomena of mind, body, and consciousness within our present hegemonic modes of identity. Through community building, collaborative experimentation, and site-specific performances, Clémentine weaves together diasporic holistic technologies and emerging immersive technologies as a creolised form of resistance. Using this mixed apparatus, they aim to decolonise our relationship with images; an invitation to turn the gaze inward and delve into the body — divine instrument of perception and karmic archive — to reclaim ancestral knowledges and sow the seeds of life-affirming futures.
Recent projects and performances include ‘Loving Fugitives, Runaway Images’ at Van Gogh House (London, 2023); ‘Metamorph’ at Goldsmiths CCA (London, 2023); ‘Burnt Shadow’ at Copperfield Gallery (London, 2023); ‘Your Rage is Sacred (maa)’ at Goldsmiths SONICS Immersive Media Labs (London, 2023); ‘hemi-sync of the heart’ at Acall Festival (London, 2023).
Details
29 February 2024
19:00
FormaHQ
140 Great Dover Street
SE1 4GW, London
Your Rage is Sacred (maa) was conceived with the support of Arts Council England, Goldsmiths College, Generation Delta, Goldsmiths CCA, Trans Dimension, Ugly Duck and Forma.