Body (Q) Corporeal (2018-2019)
I take Audre Lorde’s idea of an erotic self-gaze and build a visual eco-poetic narrative and manifesto by interacting with ecological bodies such as water, plants, trees in movement improvisation influenced by the bodies around me. As an early strategy to defy the hijacked body and histories of violent gazing imposed onto me creating an intentional space of eco-resonance between my body and that of plant and water life.
Body, body visceral
Flesh until hitting bone (x2)
Body, body corporeal
Imagination until lost in the astral (x2)
Body, body visceral
Flesh until hitting bone
Limbs dissected in salt
Processed salt inducing body cries
Body cries, gastric storms
Blood screaming in my veins from ancestors
Those, lived bodies
Came from the ground soil
The tint of the soil is imprinted in our skin
Soil, reflecting mirror, soil
Soil, reflecting mirror, soil
Soil translated into utmost nothingness
A paralysis of the flesh
Upside down reversed night
Pouring dark sea from sky
A distant rain forthcoming
Whole, whole, homogenous black mass – a formula of God
Returning soil, container of richness
While dances with the sun
Life unkept in the underground for it’s bound to expand
Melanin
Melanin lives
Melanin melting into golden lines of lighting
Melanin breathes
Feet on the ground hearing trees
Feet on the ground eating from bushes
Feet on the ground, flora germinating
Wrapping roots enlacing the body
Green from the leaves whispers the ancestral gaze
My gaze shouting through my whole body once
My androgynous gaze fluid
Your body rendered more than words, bones, micro-movements, thoughts,
But a force
Your gaze is what you make it
My boy gaze fluid
As the beats of the rain sometimes skips
As the rhythms of the ocean in cosmic waltz – all the elements dance
As the sounds of the wind laugh tickling vulvas gently in the open air
Nature of the queered eye in spaces of the twisted
Whispering new stares of the erotic from my entrails
What is your gaze whispering to you?
Body, body visceral
Flesh until hitting bone (x2)
Body, body corporeal
Imagination until lost in the astral (x2)
Body, body visceral
Flesh until hitting bone
Concept, direction, performance, writing and staging production: Sall Lam Toro
Video POV and editing: Clive Ruder
(2018) Performance version shown at Rendezvous Sensorium II - Video - og performancefestival, Aarhus, Denmark
(2018) Andromeda, Gellerup, Denmark
(2019) Domie Remont, Poznań, Poland
(2021) Video shown at Jambatan Festival, Copenhagen, Denmark