We chat all things protest and We the People related with multidisciplinary artist Katie Sfetkidis.

Adhocracy – Vitalstatistix’s renown annual arts hothouse – supports the development of new art and performance.  It runs September 2-4. Full details, including program, HERE.

First of all, tell us about ‘We the People’ – what’s the core concept of the project and what inspired you to pursue it.

The core question is “how has the pandemic changed the way we protest and the way we think about protesting”. It’s a response to the feeling of colliding set of crises – be it climate change, social and economic inequality, colonisation, housing instability, the treatment of refugees, to name a few – set against the issues of public safety.

The work was inspired by my experience of being in lockdown in Melbourne CBD over 2020 and 2021.  It gave me a lot of time to think deeply about issues that I care about, whilst also feeling like I couldn’t participate in public demonstration in the same way, mainly due to public health concerns, but also  shifting public attitudes towards large scale public demonstration and the use of the police in response. I started wondering if there were other ways that we could gather that could circumnavigate some of these issues. I was particularly inspired by the ways people were using digital technology to both connect with others and share ideas within local and global communities and I began to wonder how one could harness the emancipatory powers of digital technology to create a public demonstration that could exist both in a digital realm and IRL.

As an artist, I think it’s really important to civically engage. This work brings together my interest in feminism and the history of activism. In general my practice is influenced by what has come before and ‘We the People’, in a lot of ways feels like an extension and mash up of a number of projects I have worked on over the past few years, including ‘The Feminist Poster Project’ (2020-2021) and ‘The Women’s COVID-19 Time Capsule’ (2020-2022).

This piece explores the intersection between more traditional forms of public demonstration and the digital realm – how has this changed in recent years?

I think the pandemic has had a huge impact on our relationship to technology. Video calls and online gathering spaces are much more common now than they were two years ago, and social media has really been used to drive global social movements, and this has sometimes translated into large scale in person demonstrations – e.g., Black Lives Matter.

What is so exciting to me about these online spaces are the possibilities they open up for new encounters.  For many people, in the early days of the pandemic, video streaming platforms allowed people to access a world and events that had been inaccessible before, perhaps because of chronic illness, disability or cultural and economic reasons. It also allowed people to connect across time and space in different ways.

I am interested in how this might translate to public demonstration. For many reasons, there are people who can’t attend a public demonstration; this could be because of health, age, access, work and family commitments or public safety. I wonder how digital technology can offer an alternative, and a way to bring different groups of people together across space and time.

This seems to be a project that is very interested in the role of ‘political ephemera’ (banners, flags, placards and so on). How will you be depicting that?

Visual material is really important to any public demonstration and will be key to this work. This could be placards and posters, which already feature quite heavily in my practice, but I have dreams to also create some bigger pieces; puppets etc, along the lines of the Burning Koala from a recent Extinction Rebellion demonstration.

At this stage, I am planning on incorporating previous pieces from ‘A Feminist Poster Project’ into this new work and make new signs, banners, and flags.  I really love the idea of flag waving as something that is visually striking and can incorporate movement into the piece. It’s also a key feature for many older activists I have come across in my research and I am keen to unpack this more.

The process of creating this ephemera is just as important as their visual impact. Whilst at Adhocracy, I am inviting people to come and create new posters and banners in the studio that can feature in the work. These creative exercises allow time to think through ideas or talk them through in a communal setting, which works to build community.

Where does ‘We the People’ go after its appearance at Adhocracy?

In my dreams, ‘We the People’ will be a global event, occurring simultaneously in sites across the globe.  In the short term, I will be undertaking another creative development in Melbourne later this year and continuing to talk with activist communities across Australia. At this stage I also hope to spend some time in NSW and Queensland early next year.

 Anything else audiences should know?

‘We the People’ is just as much about the journey as it is about the final outcome. Like many past projects, I am seeking to engage with women in the community to highlight their efforts and facilitate an exchange of ideas.  I would encourage anyone up for a yarn or just wanted to listen to drop into the open studio/workshops.

We sat down with artist Catherine Ryan to discuss The Two Body Problem.

Adhocracy – Vitalstatistix’s renown annual arts hothouse – supports the development of new art and performance.  It runs September 2-4. Full details, including program, HERE.

Firstly, tell us about ‘The Two Body Problem’ – what’s the core concept that you’re exploring, and what inspired it?

‘The Two Body Problem’ is an experimental performance lecture that I have just begun to develop. The core concept is a simple speculative question: what if we had not one, but two bodies? What if every human consciousness had a spare body that it could use, instead of always being tied to the same one? How would this change the decisions we made? Would we take care of both our bodies and spend equal amounts of time in each one, or would we just spend time in the ‘good’ body and leave the other one at home? And what is a ‘good’ body, anyway?

As for what inspired it, in the most literal sense, like many artists, I have a huge document in my phone’s Notes app, full of half-baked ideas and questions that have popped into my head. One day, I was scrolling back through this vast collection of musings when I came across this question about what it would be like if we had two bodies. I don’t even remember when I wrote it. Was it something that I scrawled while I was out late one night, perhaps? I’ll never know. But it seemed compelling, even in the harsh, more critical light of day, so I started to draw more connections from it. 

I have a background in European philosophy, so it occurred to me that there are swathes of thinkers who have considered the potential duality of the body. Early Christian theological disputes about whether God and Jesus were different bodies or not. Mediaeval political theology about the two bodies of the King. Cartesian accounts of dualism – the idea that the mind is separate from the body. And more recently, discussions within Queer theory about whether or not we can speak of there being a body, prior to its existence in language, or considerations within disability studies about the difference between impairment (which is in some sense ‘inherent’) and disability (which is socially derived).

And importantly for me, not only have philosophers and theorists written about multiplicity of the body – pop singers have sung about it.

The phrase ‘experimental performance lecture’ is a fascinating one – how does this differ from the more traditional concept of a lecture and how are you subverting the academic?

The performance lecture, as a type of performance, has a history that goes back several decades, to 1960s conceptual practice, which emphasised process over finished product. Early notable practitioners of the mode include Robert Morris and Andrea Fraser. Central to this type of work is its existence between the frames of performance and academic address. Performance lectures explore the gaps and tensions between theatrical performance and academic and pedagogical contexts. They often play with authority – the authority of the figure standing in front of you as “the expert”, presenting indisputable facts about the world.

In my performance lectures to date, this playfulness has often manifested in my choice to use cheesy, well-known pop songs as entrance points into the consideration of political or philosophical questions. My techniques have also included the interruption of authoritative textual address by singing, dancing and humorous over-analysis of pop music.

You’ve identified some intriguing pop music artefacts that you’ll be utilising – what inspired their selection?

One of the ways that I often work when making performance lectures is to select a small group of pop songs – usually songs that I like myself – and then use them as unusual ways of entering into questions of a philosophical or political nature.

One of the first tracks that inspired this project was SOPHIE’s Immaterial Girl. It’s a stunning track (and it’s awful that SOPHIE’s untimely death means that we won’t get more of her incredible work). Against a hyperactive synth riff, a chipmunky voice sings about whether she would exist and be gendered without all these things that she enumerates:

 

“Without my legs or my hair

Without my genes or my blood

With no name and with no type of story

Where do I live?

Tell me, where do I exist?”

 

What a question! She seems to be asking whether gender can be considered as this radically abstract thing that doesn’t need a body at all.

I then started thinking about how there are all these songs about the materiality of the body. There’s Beyoncé’s 2006 track Get Me Bodied, for instance. This song opens with Beyoncé dramatically intoning “9… 4… 8… 1… B-Day!”. These numbers are the date that Beyonce was born – the 4th of September 1981, her birthday, or B-Day. In the context of the song, this is the day that Beyonce got a body, or got bodied. Does this mean that, prior to 1981, Beyoncé existed in some form, without a body? Was there an eternal, incorporeal form of Beyoncé floating through the universe before this? How tied is Beyoncé to her body?

These are the sorts of questions that inspire me. Also, these are excellent songs, and it’s fun to think with them.

Where does ‘The Two Body Problem’ go after its appearance at Adhocracy?

Somewhere, I hope! This is a first stage development so the piece will need more work after this before it’s performable and tourable.

Anything else audiences should know?

I’d love for them to come along to some of the workshops I’ll be running over the Adhocracy weekend. As part of the development in Adhocracy, I’m planning on running some casual discussions about the opening philosophical provocations of the project. These will be small group discussions where we can think together about questions like: Can you imagine having two bodies? What would you do if they were very different bodies? Would you change how you lived? I’d love to consider some of these questions with new groups of people.