Marking a transition into body_hacking
Body_hacking as a living and artistic practice begun several moments in time from the erotic. It returns again and again as a spiral of manifestos on fugitive formulations from living a full BLACK queer neurospicy life that I choose everyday. The erotic informs these desires to be on the run, to reinvent my life with others with full tenderness, joy, and relational resonance. That led me to orient my artistic practice more fully towards ecology as ways to listen to land ghosts, multi-specie companions and frequencies that have not been known to me in this life, but that I could somehow remember through performativities of ritual, glitch, blackening, and of land indigenisation. Dreams and imagination are always my allies and tools on carrying such intentions not only in my art making, yet also in my life and relationships.
The erotic becomes a connecting force that makes it possible for life to pour into art making and the reverse too. The erotic stands here also politicised in practice within all the ways body_hacking invites refusal in the (abled-cis-hetero)normative world.
“(…) above all feeling! I aim through experiments in feeling, to reveal and destroy what it is that keeps us here, what it is that stops us from deciding to leave even as the cinders mix with our hair, the smoke corrupts our lungs, the flames engulf the people we love.
Only when we know this can we activate the bond of the otherwise and turn back to meet it. Some call it the communist horizon (this implies some distance between us and the future,) others call it prefiguration (the future in our actions), others ‘the worlds we seek to build’ (desire desire desire) - any name will do.”
— Lola Olufemi in Experiments in imagining otherwise
A Manifesto
I wanted to take time to write (a shorter) mutant manifesto amidst my transitions (both body, life and artistic conjoined) as an exercise to divest from fixed ways of arriving at consolidated practices, or, definitions of what I do. This one focuses more on the things I am interested in and I’m invested in articulating at the moment.
My practice relates to the word antidisciplinary for some time as my pieces dialogue with each other endlessly with no fixed beginning nor end. Being a performer is central to my practice, but it isn’t more dominant than living as a body, being a collectivist, experimentalist, organiser, writer, musician, sculptor, mover, friend, thinker, feeler. The sources of my creations exist in plurality and are therefore multidimensional, which means that my pieces are often worlds that I am building (with others). There is no hierarchy between the mediums I use, they rather function in spirals with one another.
My practices arise from this mutant and resonant body-spirit I occupy, hence, I often return to same themes, aesthetics, and practices of glitch, queerness, antinormativity, eroticism, ghosts, transness, “transcorporeality” (Strongman), ecology, BLACKENING, and ancestry, because these erupt from living experience, my body and the communities I am part of. As a black gender non-conforming transsexual queer body in transition, these experiences influence my art making and life interests in general.
I do not make art for everybody, and universal art making does not exist, nor it is apolitical. I have specific bodies and species that I think of, and direct my art making towards. In the same way that I prioritise communities that I am part of in my life. First and foremost I prioritise Capital F faggoty gay niggas, and queer BIPOC people in my work, as audience and collaborators and have the desire to involve these communities while I am doing work - not only presenting work within institutions. These include black, indigenous and visibly racialised people that are trans*, queer, Femmes, crips, neurospicy, gender non-conforming thembos, lgbt-quê working class babes that live full marginalised lives and unsubscribe to heteronormative patriarchy everyday with their full chests/bosoms.
My work is often about erotic intimacies between human and non-human species, land, bodies, and energetic frequencies. I expect collaborations (whatever kind) to be filled with intimacy, be it temporarily and professional. What do I mean by intimacy? Reciprocity, (authentic) engagement, attention, presence, sharing and care between us. Reciprocity is important to me as a way to be and co-exist together as a living and work practice.
Conflicts are natural and they arise, so take it as an opportunity to getting to know yourself and others deeply. It might not feel good as we are not taught how to deal with conflict as a life skill, but it can be so transformative! I am still learning.
If you are interested in connecting or collaborating, send me an email on salllamtoro@salllamtoro.com
image @discoarab x @savoirflair IG
STATEMENT OF SOLIDARITY AGAINST GENOCIDE
I would also like to take a moment to acknowledge my stand with Palestine, Congo, Tigray, and Sudan for the end of war, imperialist and settler colonialist occupation, exploitation of peoples and land resources, ecocide, genocide, and the eternal debilitation of peoples in these nations. I am against any western global north and European colonial intervention and participation in these on going atrocities and resist in solidarity with these peoples all over the world. We must continue to resist again and again, for we cannot be free until the people in Palestine, Congo, Sudan and Tigray, and the rest of the world in which sophisticated VIOLENT liberal, capitalist and so called democratic values based tactics keep killing, imprisoning, violating, exploiting, and oppressing black, brown, indigenous, poor, trans, queer, womxn, disabled, bodies. We must continue to react and speak up of the daily constant murdering, mass destruction, erasure of cultures, displacement of peoples, land theft, and the brutal violence enacted by the Israeli state with the support of the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Sweden, and the Danish state too among others.
FREE PALESTINE ✊🏿
FREE CONGO ✊🏿
FREE TIGRAY ✊🏿
FREE SUDAN ✊🏿