http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7721955.stm

The run up to a version of inthewrongplaceness always echos with thoughts of the non human body that will join me in the work, my future piggy partner in our slow crushing dance - and the individuals of audience who will become part of the piece, points of contact, and each a vital and entirely other moment of our configuration.

I’m reading Donna Haraway’s When Species Meet and her working of knotty subjects and nodes between lineages of life, figurations of biocultural and social networks. The knottiness reminds me of my own preocupation with knots, originally borrowed from an Elizabeth Bronfen book, The Knotted Subject, Hysteria and It’s Discontents, and the dynamism of threads that knot into subjectivities, recalled as interior and bodily. Haraway’s knottedness speaks of arching and shifting junctures between and across individuals, kin, alliances, techno-somatic, temporal, spatial.

I thrive on textile and textual metaphors, tissue and techné threads and gaps, juntures and torchons, relational - all being experienced and lived as my very own often troubling essays of  uncomings with fleshy messes and messy fleshes, living, non-living, often troublingly consumed. Arm arcs into pipette gun connected to 10 ml pipette that aspirates and expunges DMEM and C2C12s into single cell solution, baby cow blood without the red bits stymying the enzyme decolonisation of the trypsin. My (my?) own knottyself -  contingent - deferred.

There is a hefty see saw, too violent to get to grips with the deorientation between the scale up and the scale down between species (non human animal model and human) and the very similar slides of cells, all very sick with illnesses of the muscle bits of body. Gestation parallels and checks made, in the knowledge building between the clinic and the place of research. Acute anguish of sickness, untimely losses creating another topple in the see saw of a lab meeting.

I am reminded of the girly piggy I’ll meet on Friday as I watch George Franju’s 1949 Le Sang des Bêtes, abbatoir scenes, brutal and stunning, cacophonies of twitches and flayings - butcher and surgeon techné of flaying. The blows delivering death also build cycst like swellings on the wrist that issues of the stike. The unrelenting repetition of carcassed bodies in the abbatoir call a stark visual memory I have of many pigs bodies on gurneys after a surgeons workshop, guts spilling, an ambiance of farm yard shit in the smooth clinical setting.

The film’s final text quotes:

I shall strike you without anger
And without hate, like a butcher.

The Man Who Tortures Himself, Les Fleur du Mal Baudelaire.

And finally, for this moment, the large and amplified pig carcass,  used as percussive instrument during Scott Walker’s Drifting and Tilting at the Barbican on Saturday night.

 Next week, on 21st November I am performing inthewrongplaceness as part of the 13th International Festival of Performance Ex Teresa Arte Actual 2008 “Controlled Accidents”

It’s hugely exciting, not just because it’s in Mexico City but also being invited to perform  within such a fantastic context and selection of artist.

This work has been remade for a number of contexts, sites and spaces, each one tangling with and informing the action in radically differing ways.