HUMANIMAL

 

In this performance, Blue Pieta writes a score from Bhanu Kapil's humanimal [a project for future children], a book-length poem based on the story of the Wolfgirls of Midanpure, Kamala and Amala, raised by a wolf-mother and humanised by missionary Reverend Joseph Singh in 1921. Kapil reads non-consecutive excerpts selected then sutured by the collective, as the performance incarnates and transmutes the feral and heavenly realities of these girls.

 

Inspired by Jack Halberstam’s notion of the queer as wildness, the feral becomes the queer which dances on the verge of animal and human, housewife and child, killer and killed opening a hidden door to an invisible layer of fascia. This layer is so sensitive it feels everything, it allows the human body to receive love. And so, the stage becomes the fascia enclosing an organ whose pulse unwrites the possibility of fixed identity and documentation, converting it into a site of transformation, fissuring its outlines and limits even as it heals.

 

Paired with a roaring accompaniment of sound: the Saz, Flamenco Guitar, Sufi chants and lullaby to birth an image of dawn and meat.

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Film available on request

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Queer Earth and Liquid Matters, part of Serpentine’s Back to Earth project, 16-17 July 2022, Stone Nest. Photo by Talie Rose Eigeland. Courtesy of the artist and Serpentine.