nadahada-blog

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strange vulvic wound deities that birth an octopus every 13 cycles of the planetary moons

artefact for Going Extinct, nadahada, 2018

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Mezcla multispecies drag striptease @ Kinanimate Objects, Secret Project Robot, Brooklyn, NY Feb 18 2018

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“Unfashioning the Past” cartomancy

performance installation @ BAE: Uprising, Town Stages, NYC Jan 20 2018

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unfashioning the past

“unfashioning the past” cartomancy at BAE: Uprising, Jan 20 2018

This piece is an immersive participatory performance. It is a cartomancy (card reading) about feminized embodiments that have been silenced, distorted, or erased by an officialized history, and a collective world-making practice of storytelling. 

We opened up a portal in the basement, to make an intimate cave for interaction. Visitors were given the option to dress themselves in costumes that we provided, which were hanging on the wall. Using a deck of cards that features untold histories from around the world, which we designed ourselves, we invited participants to choose cards. We took turns telling them about each card’s stories, and then synthesized the main themes of each one into a message for the day to inspire accountability and action. 

Our intention is to bring to light subjugated experiences by reading pasts that are yet-to-come (yet-to-be-told), rather than left behind—aiming for a space that holds critical intimacy rather than critical distance, in order to motivate what Chela Sandoval calls “oppositional consciousness”-raising.

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“Little Egypts”

in collaboration with Alia Ayman

Performers: nadahada + Alia Ayman, Nathalie Moreno

“On Display”

Kimmel Galleries, NYC

December 2017

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“Little Egypts” 

in collaboration with Alia Ayman 

Performers: nadahada, Alia Ayman, Nathalie Moreno

“On Display”

Kimmel Galleries, NYC

December 2017

Wearing a typical bellydancing costume, an uncanny plastic doll mask and painted like an automaton, Little Egypt (Juliana) stands in the center of the diorama, hips moving in the same circular motion for the duration of the performance. Outside, there is a Carnival Barker (Nathalie), with a purple glitter beard, calling to the passers-by and onlookers and handing them ticket-like cards that contradict her ballyhoo words, each with one of five different quotes from critical texts by Edward Said, bell hooks, Malek Alloula, Marianna Torgovnick, and Christina Cogdell. Alongside the Barker is the Juggler of Boobs (María)–wearing a monstrous pink bowler hat with boob eyeballs, a bra top with boobs on the outside, a light-up jacket, and juggling light-up boob balls. Thomas Edison (Alia), in the suit and top hat, observes the scene through an antique camera lens. Behind Edison is the cinematographer, filming the scene, and behind the cinematographer is the audience.

Regarding how imaginaries are constructed through what is included and left out, the performance relates to the frame–the framing of Orientalist scenes, the camera frame. Through this, it has a recursive quality of looking, which is made explicit through the cinematographer filming Thomas Edison filming, by using a technique of mise en abyme that subverts multiple gazes–white, male, colonizer, filmic, spectatorial. Additionally, there is Little Egypt’s awareness of being looked at, by the spectators and the cameras, that exposes the artifice or fiction implicated by the framing of the diorama. And the cameras themselves also created a distance between the window and the audience to gawk comfortably, but when the Barker asked audience members to approach the window, they were hesitant, unsure, uncomfortable. However, Little Egypts did dance in public spaces like this to attract people into sideshows and cabarets, and audience members were usually emboldened to “step right up” to the Other, as the barkers gave their spiel. In this way, the performance also calls to the way in which Arabs and other colonized people have been portrayed as exotified others and put on display along with “freaks” in museums, sideshows, and human zoos. With all of these parts, the performance involves the possibility of a reflexive consciousness of the act of looking for everyone involved. Recalling these histories by distorting them and pointing out their methods and tropes can aid in understanding how dominant Western forms of knowledge production construct narratives of “backwards” and “primitive” populations, to justify racial hierarchies and military interventions.

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String Figure Wormhole for Endangered Creatures

Installation in From Outrage to Action at the Gallatin Gallery at NYU, curated by Keith Miller. September 2017

We wanted to create an uncanny viewing experience for the video Endangered! The Interwoven World of Toxic Creatures, to envelop viewers in an immersive space, or perhaps catch them in our stringy web. The gallery looks as if it is peeling, unfolding onto another world–perhaps the kind of world in which a sci-fi/fantasy montage would be moving on an embellished gold picture frame. And as the installation unfolds this world, the viewer is folded into it, creating a transformative space in which the distance between the work and the viewer is collapsed.

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the evaginated kayak, performance sketch, 2016.

description:

two of us are dressed as foxy creatures or zorras. zorra is the feminine of fox. in english, this is called a vixen (or "a spiteful or quarrelsome woman," according to the dictionary). plus there is also the foxy lady (which, according to Bitches, Bimbos, and Ballbreakers: The Guerrilla Girls' Illustrated Guide to Female Stereotypes is one of the only always positive stereotypes). in spanish, zorra is also used as a slang for the words slut and pussy. we dress as foxes, but have painted our snouts with bright red lipstick and have vulvas on the inside of each ear. as a manifestation of these female fox-human hybrids, in addition to our actions throughout the performance, we trouble the terms surrounding the feminine of fox and call their meaning in the larger cultures into question.

in this piece, we interact with a vulva kayak, which is carved out of foam and fits like a tutu. the oar for the kayak is made up of two tampons, that are also carved out of foam and painted. these @bjects inhabit an inflatable kiddie pool with boob balls and flowers floating in the water. wearing a garden hose that replaces the dildo in a strap-on harness, one zorra fills the pool, stroking the hose, while the other one rows the kayak with the tampons. once the pool is filled with enough water/bodily fluid, the zorra wearing the evaginated kayak will come out of the pool and take off the tutu, leaving the tampons inside the vulva kayak’s opening. under the tutu, the foxy creature wears a thong with a tongue sewn to the feathery fabric. this zorra thrusts their pelvis in wheel position as the thong-tongue teases the garden hose.

yet in the middle of this act, a transwoman referee, whose name is pronounced DUR-tee-SLUT BICH, blows on a rape whistle, shaped like a penis, that hangs from her neck. the whistle signals the moment in which the thrusting zorra takes kitchen tongs out of their vagina to clamp the garden hose, cutting the water from running and taking the hose out of the strap-on harness. after this, one of the foxy creatures unhooks the tampons that made up the oar, and they transform into poi to perform tricks. meanwhile, the other zorra juggles the boob balls from the pool. we then collectively map on the floor with chalk keywords written on cardboard, such as: essentialized identity, sexual exceptionalism, subjugated embodiment, coercive consent, queer hybridity, fluid disidentification, and anomalous multiplicity. 

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black mountain sunday school: collaborative mapping workshop in washington square park, august 28, 2016.

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una mezcla queer de materia vibrante

cosmiko, la plata, argentina

2016

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venimos a proyectar videos en sus guatas

we are coming to project videos on your bellies 

la plata, argentina, 2016

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arde closet, plazoleta noche de los lápices, la plata, argentina

2016