I’m so happy to be facilitating a workshop on Political Systems, via Theater of the Oppressed, performance and poetry, at Femina Potens next week in their series of workshops for LGBTQ youth. Here’s their announcement about the series that my workshop will be a part of.

Femina Potens is thrilled to announce [...]]]>

I’m so happy to be facilitating a workshop on Political Systems, via Theater of the Oppressed, performance and poetry, at Femina Potens next week in their series of workshops for LGBTQ youth. Here’s their announcement about the series that my workshop will be a part of.

Femina Potens is thrilled to announce that our FP Family & Youth Program will be pairing up with queer youth organization LYRIC to teach art, film, and writing courses every monday starting October 17th – May 2012. Our course will consist of 7 queer youth ages 17 – 19 and will conclude with a screening of a documentary on the program, a gallery exhibit, and written works created by the youth during the program. We will be updating you monthly on our youth’s progress. For more information on LYRIC visit LYRIC.org

As an artist/theorist, I find myself thinking a lot lately about the place of the personal in my work, and I wonder how other HASTAC scholars and readers think about these issues.

A major part of my aesthetic as a performance artist has been a choice to place personal [...]]]> repost from my HASTAC blog.

As an artist/theorist, I find myself thinking a lot lately about the place of the personal in my work, and I wonder how other HASTAC scholars and readers think about these issues.

A major part of my aesthetic as a performance artist has been a choice to place personal risk and intimacy at the core of my art practice. This choice is inspired by artists such as Carollee Schneeman, Sophie Calle, Marina Abramovic and Ulay, Linda Montano and Hannah Wilke, who have chosen to make their personal lives and the intimate relationships the subject of their work. Often, this is a feminist strategy of making the personal political. As Chris Kraus writes in I Love Dick, an intensely personal and theoretical book of memoir/fiction:

Let a girl choose death — Janis Joplin, Simone Weil– and death becomes her definition, the outcome of her “problems.” To be female till means beng trapped within the purely psychological. No matter how dispassionate or large a vision of the world a woman formulates, whenever it includes her own experience and emotion, the telescope’s turned back on her. (196)

In another part of the book, on the work of Hannah Wilke, Kraus says that Wilke’s work was focused on the question “If women have failed to make ‘universal’ art because we’re trapped within the ‘personal,’ why not universalize the ‘personal’ and make it the subject of our art?” (211)

I am very seriously interested in these questions as they pertain to scholarship and in my role as, or performance of, an artist/theorist. As I write my essay the upcoming Marxism and New Media conference at Duke, I am not sure how much, if any at all, personal experience to include. Does my role as a performance artist stop when I am writing academic papers, in the drive for legitimacy? Does personal experience and emotion somehow necessarily devalue scholarly work? As a performance artist, I am not sure if the personal cost of using my life in my work is worth the outcome, or if I would be satisfied not including my personal experience in my work.

These questions also apply to other people who create personal artwork as part of their scholarship, including poets and writers. Here I am thinking ofJeanne Jo in the iMAP PhD program at USC as well as Margaret Rhee and her current project on queer love poems. It seems queer theory in general, as well as feminist theory, has a major stake in one’s personal relationship to one’s material, as much as many scholars attempt to have an “objective” approach. How are reviewers, for journals or for tenure, supposed to be “objective” when evaluating work of mine that deals with intimate details of my life?

I find that academic frequently supports and perhaps encourages certain categories of people to do certain categories of work, like the queer people doing queer theory, indigenous people writing indigenous theory, mixed race people studying critical mixed race theory, the list goes on. What are the implications and limitations of this? Is it something we should support with our own scholarship or break away from?

Additionally, as digital media scholars and artists, the lines between personal and scholarly are often blurred in online contexts. While I could choose to do things differently, and visitor to my Flickr page may see images of my artwork or images of my personal life, and similarly with Facebook. How do you deal with these issues?

Repost of my original post from OccupyEverything.org. Please read, RT and comment.

I just got back from having dinner with a friend of mine who spent many nights at OccupyLA. This is a person who I think has a good understanding of gender politics and of what happened at OccupyLA. I was [...]]]> [trigger warning]

Repost of my original post from OccupyEverything.org. Please read, RT and comment.

I just got back from having dinner with a friend of mine who spent many nights at OccupyLA. This is a person who I think has a good understanding of gender politics and of what happened at OccupyLA. I was shocked to hear him tell me that there were probably over 10 or over 20 or more cases of sexual assault at OccupyLA. As someone who has been following the tweets, articles, blog posts and when I can the live feed for OccupyLA very closely since it began, I was incredibly disheartened to hear these numbers. My understanding was that there was one case. This says to me that people have been keeping these incidents out of public discussion to protect the movement, which is incredibly upsetting because if the Occupy movement thinks that sexual assault is tolerable in any way than I will be so ashamed that I ever supported them in any way. Clearly, a movement that is so multiplicitous and with such fuzzy boundaries as the Occupy movement can’t be said to hold many or possibly any opinions or priorities, but I would say that it seems like there may have been an effort by many Occupy organizers to keep the number of sexual assaults a secret.

Why is this such a problem? Don’t the people experiencing assault have the right to their privacy? Yes, of course they do, but as a woman and a trans person, I feel like I would have not been safe sleeping at OccupyLA and I wouldn’t have known it until I was there, possibly until it was too late because the issue was kept so well under wraps that someone following the news every day and talking to everyone they knew, including participants, organizers and scholars following the occupations didn’t know at all how prevalent the issue was.

I felt unsafe from my first time at Occupy LA, the first march to City Hall. That day, I was with my girlfriend and two men tried to hit on us and one even grabbed her arm with no invitation at all to do so. I knew from that first moment in the bright daylight that this was not a safe place for me to sleep.

I was so sad to hear these words come from my friend’s mouth, he said that every night you could hear someone yelling “get out! get the fuck out of my tent!” and that there was so much booze and drugs. He also said that the claim that there were many assaults was being used as a right wing “troll” tactic, but that is no excuse for hiding the problem if it exists. He also said that even at the General Assembly, where the issue of assault was discussed two nights, that while many people came to the mic to say that the issue should be discussed (for 10 minutes) that still many others came to the mic to say that the camp is about wall street and not about this issue. Additionally, my friend said that very few women were staying in the camp towards the end near the eviction.

I have also had numerous people ask me, when I bring up the issue of sexual assault at occupations, if this is above the usual number of assaults that happen. As if it mattered? That response is clearly a way of minimalizing and normalizing the issue of sexual assault instead of taking responsibility for the fact that as people who support this movement, even by writing and tweeting about it, we may be supporting the creation of a space where people are sexually assaulted. Now we have to certainly distinguish between different occupations, but if organizers are keeping this issue a secret how can people even know?

I am so incredibly disheartened by this news and I think that as participants in this movement, which I consider myself having been to many rallies and events, and as supporters, we need to understand the extent of this problem. Perhaps this is something that the #OccupyData hackers can try to find, a number of cases of sexual assault at different occupations? How can people accept this? I refuse to participate in a movement which would attempt to create intentional space to envision a new world in which sexual assault is acceptable and should be kept quiet.

To those who would say this is a peripheral issue, I absolutely disagree. I propose that the question as to whether we can create spaces which challenging existing institutions of violence, such as economic inequality, without reproducing and even worsening other institutions of violence, such as a patriarchal rape culture, must be central to the occupation movement. Whose liberation and equality is this movement about?

UPDATE: 1:49pm: I want to add, to be clear, that I am fully in support of prison abolitionist and community based strategies for responding to and preventing sexual violence which increase community autonomy and do not depend on police. That is precisely why the handling of this issue in these autonomous spaces is so important to me. Additionally, I want to add that I am in no way trying to reproduce a gender binary, white centered, class privileged analysis, I fully acknowledge that people of all genders are affected by sexual violence and the most affected groups are transgender women of color and sex workers.

This year, I’m a HASTAC Scholar, which means I’m blogging both on this site and on theirs. Actually, since this site is mostly for announcements, I do most of my blogging over at HASTAC nowadays. I’m posting part of this entry here to help spur more discussion about these topics.

http://hastac.org/blogs/michacardenas/2011/11/26/hastac-community-standards-and-interdisciplinarity

The [...]]]>

This year, I’m a HASTAC Scholar, which means I’m blogging both on this site and on theirs. Actually, since this site is mostly for announcements, I do most of my blogging over at HASTAC nowadays. I’m posting part of this entry here to help spur more discussion about these topics.

http://hastac.org/blogs/michacardenas/2011/11/26/hastac-community-standards-and-interdisciplinarity

The recent discussion in the thread Community Standards for Virtual Spaces was spurred by, among other posts, my post of Elle Mehrmand’s performance fauxlographic. The post contained an image from the performance which contained nudity, and therefore the HASTAC site admins edited my post to remove the image and link to the UCSD Visual Art Department‘s website which is hosting the image. I wish that this wasn’t two weeks before the end of the semester and I didn’t have two papers to write, on top of conference papers, publisher deadlines and deadlines for galleries for spring shows, so that I had more time to respond. Still, I am eager to post a few thoughts in response to the very rich discussions which have taken place in the standards forum.

First, I want to state in response to Fiona’s self described “disjointed” comment, which was actually very compelling and apparently very heartfelt, that I love HASTAC. I have met some of my nearest and dearest colleagues in academic thanks to HASTAC, as well as developed sone wonderful friendships. I even met my current PhD advisor, Jack Halberstam, in the HASTAC forum on Queer and Feminist New Media Spaces. I am joining in this discussion with the best of intentions, in order to participate as a HASTAC scholar in making HASTAC as amazing, participatory and transformative as I believe it can be. I am so grateful to the HASTAC scholars, to Fiona and Cathy and everyone who makes HASTAC possible and holds open this space for artistic, academic and theoretical experimentation.

Second, I am very concerned about the suggestion that the legal Terms of Service be used as the basis for the Community Standards document. Among other things, the Terms of Service prohibits posting any material which is “offensive… vulgar, obscene, profane, or is racially, ethnically or is otherwise objectionable;… (iii) Content that is pornographic, sexually explicit or contains nudity; … Content which contains software, software viruses… links to other websites that contain Content not in compliance with the Terms of Service” These restrictions, as I understand them, could be easily interpreted to disallow Critical Code Studies discussions of software code for computer viruses, The Queer and Feminist New Media forum’s discussion of Monica Ong’s skin whitening remedy for asian women, Alexis Lothian’s vidding discussion which links to erotic (possibly pornographic) vid remixes of Battlestar Galactica, and a whole host of other very important discussions on HASTAC regarding the intersections of digital culture with art, race, gender, sex and ability and how those intersections inform our understanding of comtemporary power and social control.

The point made by John Carter McKnight is central, I think, in that the real problem here is self-policing at the risk of preventing important discussions of contemporary issues. I cited Ai Weiwei’s recent tweet saying ”if they see nudity as pornography then china is stuck in the Qing dynasty” not to be snarky, but to point to the fact that these issues are very contemporary and global. The removal of Elle Mehrmand’s poster for fauxlographic cannot be separated from the fact that her performance is about Iran and Wikileaks. Her body parts as covered or uncovered in that flyer are a direct response to the headscarves worn by Muslim women and the perception of certain types of bodies as terrorist bodies, the agency of women to choose to over or uncover themselves and the rhetorics of American exceptionalism which would present the US as a rational place of democracy in contrast to an oppressive regime which forces women to cover their bodies in order to justify military action against Iran.

By removing her flyer, HASTAC is reproducing the act of forcing women’s bodies to be covered up which Iran and other middle eastern countries are accused of as a justification for war, and doing so under a heteronormative rhetoric of protecting the children.

Read the rest at HASTAC.org

fauxlographic

//elle mehrmand

november [21-23] 2011

opening reception monday 11-21-11 @ 6pm
performance @ 7pm

university of california san diego
visual arts facility // performance space

fauxlographic is a performative installation that takes place within an ethno-dysphoric cloning lab, where one can clone themselves in order to analyze their diasporic anxiety. The fauxlographic clones enact sonic rituals in Farsi, [...]]]>

fauxlographic

//elle mehrmand

november [21-23] 2011

university of california san diego
visual arts facility // performance space

fauxlographic is a performative installation that takes place within an ethno-dysphoric cloning lab, where one can clone themselves in order to analyze their diasporic anxiety. The fauxlographic clones enact sonic rituals in Farsi, English and Perz-ish, based on multiple sources of information including  embodied memories, wikileaks cables, and textual references concerning Iran and Persia. The ethno-dysphoric scientist performs a daily computing ritual wearing a neuro-headset, (pars)ing the (fars)e of the clones’ information. When high levels of CO2 are detected by the lab’s sensors, the pixellated flesh of the clones degrade and multiply, reciprocating the affective presence of other bodies. The use of organic sensors transforms the lab into a spatial interface, confusing the somatic architecture of the performance.

gallery hours: tues-wed 12-6
performance @ 3pm

elleelleelle.org
assemblyofmazes.com

I’m working on a new project focused on creating autonomous local networks that don’t rely on corporate infrastructures to function. I imagine these having a broad range of possible uses, but the initial inspiration was to create technologies to facilitate communication to prevent gendered violence, inspired by community based, anti-racist, prison abolitionist responses [...]]]>

I’m working on a new project focused on creating autonomous local networks that don’t rely on corporate infrastructures to function. I imagine these having a broad range of possible uses, but the initial inspiration was to create technologies to facilitate communication to prevent gendered violence, inspired by community based, anti-racist, prison abolitionist responses to violence. The project description is below. As part of this project, I also created a prototype line of clothing and accessories [Photos] [Video] exploring the possibilites for anti-capitalist fashion by experimenting with how EL wire might serve as a useful indicator for safety devices.

Autonets – Local Autonomy Networks

Local Autonomy Networks (Autonets) empower communities to become more autonomous through collectively agreed on networks of communication. A group of sex workers collectively organize to protect each other from violence. A group of protesters need information about where other groups of protesters are in order to take improvised collective action. A group of activists agree to know where each other are at regular times to be able to know immediately of state and paramilitary violence against their collective. A community of people of color agree to come to each other’s aid in the event of police harassment. A polyamorous group of friends want to let each other know when they are available for a date without using text messages. People finding themselves in an environmental crisis need to know how to find each other. A group of bicyclists want to flock together for a group ride. A group of women, transgender and cisgender, agree to let each other know when they are walking home and when they’ve arrived home safely. All of these communities can benefit from Autonets, remapping urban environments.

Autonets will include the development of technologies including mesh networked wearable electronics to provide locative data, community building methods, theory and poetry. These technologies will be developed through workshops and collective design processes, inspired by existing networks of horizontal knowledge production in queer, transgender, survivors of gender violence and diasporic communities.

An initial approach in the series will be a series of wearable electronic devices that use a 3 part grammar to signal to other wearers of similar devices. The approach I am starting with will use Xbee wireless transmitters, led lights and vibration motors to be able to send direction and distance information, along with three different messages, whose meaning will be decided among the community sharing the devices. The devices may be used to signal an impending danger of personal violence, or that a violent incident is taking place, or that another bicyclist is nearby who wants to share a biking route. These devices arose from discussions with collaborators including Grupo 0,29 in Bogotá, Elle Mehrmand, Anne Balsamo and François Bar’s Mobile Technology Hacking class at the Annenberg Innovation Lab and Adam Tinnell, MFA candidate in Otis College of Art and Design’s Public Practice Program, as well as discussions with Jack Halberstam and faculty from the Media Arts and Practice (iMAP) Program.

Autonets focus on building community autonomy for informal networks to create collective responses to social emergencies created by capitalism, white supremacy and neo-colonialism, inspired by the prison abolitionist movement and movements to end gender violence. As Morgan Bassichis writes in “Reclaiming Queer & Trans Safety” in The Revolution Starts at Home, “safety comes through stronger relationships, more healing , and increased support, not more prisoners or police or longer prison sentences.” As global capitalism continues to produce new forms of emergency daily, from ecological to economic disasters to mass uprisings, it is clear that people can no longer depend on corporate networks of communication. Both because of the logistical failures of top down centralization and because of their ability to be shut down by governments, such as in the case recently in Egypt as well as in San Francisco during #OpBart. Autonets will help people create local, informal networks through collective action.

This project has received support from the Annenberg Innovation Lab and the Media Arts and Practice Program at USC. It was presented at the UCLA Queer Studies 2011 conference and the Queerture QUEER + COUTURE Fashion Show.

I’m currently working on a book manuscript to be published by Atropos Press in the next few months, including texts written by myself and in collaboration with Elle Mehrmand and transcriptions of panels with Stelarc, Sandy Stone, Ricardo Dominguez, Amy Sara Carroll, Brian Holmes and James Morgan. Zach Blas is the [...]]]>

I’m currently working on a book manuscript to be published by Atropos Press in the next few months, including texts written by myself and in collaboration with Elle Mehrmand and transcriptions of panels with Stelarc, Sandy Stone, Ricardo Dominguez, Amy Sara Carroll, Brian Holmes and James Morgan. Zach Blas is the editor of the book. Check back here for more info! Below is a description of the book.

The Transreal: Political Aesthetics of Crossing Realities explores the use of multiple simultaneous realities as a medium in contemporary art. Building on the notion of “trans” from transgender, meaning crossing boundaries of gender, I propose that transreal aesthetics cross the boundaries created by a proliferation of conceptions of reality that occurred as a result of postmodern theory. Building on the notion of experimental affective politics that I developed in my first book Trans Desire/Affective Cyborgs, co-authored with Barbara Fornssler, I claim that an understanding of building and working with multiple realities is essential for artists and political actors to have agency today.

Proposing three operations for dealing with multiple realities, The Transreal discusses artists and art collectives including: Blast Theory, whose alternate reality game “Ulrike and Eamon Compliant” invites users to walk the streets of Venice as the leftist militant Ulrike Meinhoff; mez breeze, whose poems explore anonymous hacktivism through her own literary genre that uses code syntax to perform multiple characters simultaneously; and Reza Negarestani, Ricardo Dominguez and Zach Blas’ whose works invent new fields of technological imaginary, creating their own logics. Through these artists’ work and my own, I demonstrate that the medium of transreal art has broad implications across new media, performance art, e-poetry and emerging literary genres. The book spans a wide range of genres including theoretical analyses of artworks, poetry, source code, technical diagrams, photos of performances and custom made electronics as well as discussions with leading thinkers in the fields of new media and performance art including Stelarc, Rosanne Allucquére Stone and Ricardo Dominguez.

The book includes writings from and about my own transreal performances: Becoming Dragon and collaborations with Elle Mehrmand including Becoming Transreal, technésexual and virus.circus. Becoming Dragon (2008) questions the one-year requirement of “Real Life Experience” that transgender people must fulfill in order to receive Gender Confirmation Surgery, and asks if this could be replaced by one year of ‘Second Life Experience’ to lead to Species Reassignment Surgery. For the performance, I lived for 365 hours immersed in the online 3D environment of Second Life with a head mounted display, only seeing the physical world through a video feed, and wrote software to use a motion capture system to map my movements into Second Life. For technésexual (2009-2010), Elle Mehrmand and myself wore custom made heart rate monitors and temperature sensors while we kissed and undressed in front of a live audience. Simultaneously for an audience in Second Life, our avatars also kissed while the sound of our live heart beats was played for both audiences, pitch shifted according to our body temperatures, creating an organic interface for making music. Becoming Transreal (2010) was performed at the UCLA Freud Playhouse and consisted of a ritual in which I would read a poem and once each poem ended, Elle Mehrmand would use a hand pump to increase the pressure in suction cups attached to my breasts while we were both motion captured by a Vicon motion capture system that moved our avatar’s positions in real time. The performance used slipstream poetry to consider possible futures of nano-bio drug piracy and the intersections of transnational and transgender experiences. virus.circus is an episodic series of performances exploring a speculative world of queer futures of latex sexuality and DIY medicine in resistance to virus hysteria. Code switching between mixed and alternate reality, virus.circus asks how we can use reality as a medium, resonating across a number of modes including public space interventions, performances in museums and galleries and networked performances.

The notion of transreal is informed by the theorist Jack Halberstam who makes “the perhaps overly ambitious claim that there is such a thing as “queer time” and “queer space.”” Expanding on this, one can see the acceptance and embrace of multiple worlds, times and realities as a fundamental characteristic of late postmodernism or post-postmodernism.

“Transition”, a video I created with the Electroncic Disturbance Theater 2.0/b.a.n.g. lab, including Elle Mehrmand, Ricardo Dominguez, Amy Sara Carroll and Brett Stalbaum, is being shown at the MIX 24 Queer Experimental Film Festival, along with another video from our group, “Precession”. I’m so thrilled about being included in this amazing program put [...]]]>

“Transition”, a video I created with the Electroncic Disturbance Theater 2.0/b.a.n.g. lab, including Elle Mehrmand, Ricardo Dominguez, Amy Sara Carroll and Brett Stalbaum, is being shown at the MIX 24 Queer Experimental Film Festival, along with another video from our group, “Precession”. I’m so thrilled about being included in this amazing program put together by Jian Chen.

Saturday, November 19 · 6:00pm - 7:30pm

From different regions and diasporas, NOISE brings together transgender/queer media insurrections in the globally networked information economy. These media shorts focus on the gender and sexual deviants, queer kin, street youth, activists, independent artists, laborers, migrants, and cultural workers that occupy the informal edges of conglomerate information infrastructures. More onscreen, online stream than film, video, game, performance, television, photography, or music, each piece exploits the interactivity, mobility, and liveness of networked media, rather than preserving the discrete aesthetics of medium, form, and genre. Together, they reject the replacement of one normative set of icons, images, messages, and protocols with another. And they flood the cocoons of atomized life in the so-called Age of Information with noise.

NOISE Curator: Jian Chen

NOISE featured media shorts:

SOUND SPECTRUM (World Premiere)
Directed by Kenya Robinson
(2010, USA, video, color, English, 0:40 minutes)
Neither mourning nor celebrating the transition from image to information, this piece shows the gradients of color, contrast, focus, and signal that flow through so-called white noise.

AVENTURAS FAMILIARES (US Premiere, uncensored version)
Directed by Cheto Castellano, Daniel Benavides, and Lissette Olivares
(2010, Chile, video and animation, color, Spanish with English subtitles, 29 minutes)
Journey from the countryside to the Santiago metropolis with a motley family that includes ex-prostitute matriarch Trans, robber-clown father Payaso, and porn star daughter Jot. Their epic search for their family tree brings them head-to-head with cyborg agents of the multinational media corporation that has seized the Chilean capital.

TRANSSEXUAL DOMINATRIX (New York Premiere)
Directed by Shawna Virago
(2011, USA, video, color, English, 3 minutes)
San Francisco underground muse, Shawna Virago, doles out lyrical pleasure-pain with a sweet growl. This power-femme flashes a whole arsenal of toys, singing “I do it for the leather, I do it for the power, I do it for the pleasure of two fifty an hour.”

TRANSITIONS #NEWYORKCITY (New York Premiere)
Directed by Nadine Hutton
(2011, South Africa/USA, cell phone video, color, English, 6:12 minutes)
Drawn from the cell phone album of the director, a renowned South African photojournalist, this cell video turns snapshots into transitioning windows that capture the creative lives of New York City transgender/queer artists. Playing with the limits of montage, these moving cell images give impressions of a past-future, just shy of a memoire, vignette, or narrative sequence.

TRANSBORDER IMMIGRANT TOOL: PRECESSION (US Premiere)
Directed by Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0 and BANG Lab
(2009, USA, video and animation, color, English, 1:37 minutes)
The Transborder Immigrant Tool, developed by Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0, retools GPS (Global Positioning System) for use on low-tech cell phones to help immigrants crossing the US-Mexican border. The Tool redirects technology used by nation-states to measure territory towards a more universal cosmology of celestial navigation, guiding human border-crossings across time.

PUMZI
Directed by Wanuri Kahui
(2009, Kenya/South Africa, video, color, English, 23 minutes)
This award winning science fiction film traverses the authoritarian desert ecology of an underground city, struggling to preserve its last natural resources in a futuristic Africa. In this parched dystopia, sedated androgynous citizens subsist at minimum vitality, confined indoors by command of the Maitu Council. A museum curator inside the city’s compounds attempts to escape outside, in the hopes of planting a rare, if not extinct, seedling.

TRANSBORDER IMMIGRANT TOOL: TRANSITION (US Premiere)
Directed by Electronic Disturbance Theater and BANG Lab
(2009, USA, video and animation, color, English and Spanish, 1:37 minutes)
Far from just an instrument, the Transborder Immigrant Tool is a mythic, poetic, and erotic recoding of technology. Re-oriented towards the embodied, migrant user of the cell phone, the Global Positioning System (GPS) can be re-rooted in the cellular and transcendental “tradition of migration, a tradition of long walks.”

BATH OF DIONYSIS (New York Premiere)
Directed by Yozmit
(2010, USA, video, color, Korean and English, 5:28 minutes)
Singer, performance artist, and costume designer Yozmit teleports us into a labyrinth, where we witness an initiation through ritual bath. Yozmit’s haunting voice, evoking traditional Korean pansori, and her metamorphosing body-costume revel in the interplay between beauty and confinement.

Ticket and MIX information:

http://mixnyc.org

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=289671277717891