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DESCRIPTION

Rupture and its iterative manifestations was born of an interdisciplinary and collaborative process bringing together photo, video and sound artist Jessie Boylan, researcher, writer and performer Virginia Barratt, digital media artist Linda Dement and trauma-informed psychotherapist Jenna Tuke.

Through a performance of vocalities and gestures sited within a multi-channel video and sound installation, Rupture investigates the ways in which the body and the world mimic each other in modes of panic and crisis. The work interprets how symptoms of environmental and human ‘disorder’ can be seen as an appropriate response to personal traumas and global catastrophe.

The work explores – through the politics of vulnerability – how panic and anxiety, often underpinned by personal and collective grief, pain, anger, loss, trauma, has a “palpable extension in the world”[1]. The work asks us how to stay with the trouble[2] of our catastrophic times

In our current age of anxiety; global politics, ecological devastation, insecurity and instability pervade our daily lives; we are constantly faced with present and imminent environmental and psychological ‘rupture’. These ruptures reveal a human moment beneath the machinations of catastrophic late capitalism doing its work. By considering this human panic as both urgency and agency, can we begin to develop ways of engaging with, and exiting from, catastrophe?

When anxiety exceeds its own capacity as a productive force, it becomes difficult to stay with the trouble. In staying with the trouble can we work together with the dead and dying, can we hold the pain of the earth/body but reconfigure the traumas beneath the surface to move us on from stasis.

[1]Jill Bennett, Empathic Vision, Affect, Trauma and Contemporary Art, Stanford University Press, 2005, p 49
[2] Donna J. Haraway