Obsidiana, Estranha, Erotica e Ultravioleta (2024)
The live performance (re)work continues to evolve into a hypererotic descent of heightened physicality, eruptions of sensuous games and collective evocations of love born from the installation universe of Obsidian Dream Love Letters (series) that began in 2023 - an ancestral offering, a dramaturgy of sensuous rituals, a surrealist love letter for black queer erotic consciousness.
Obsidiana
My conspirator and fellow co-performer Suziethecockroach and our supportive companions obsidian and rose quartz returned in stone and sculpture within a two-piece altar with fruit, resin, perfume, sage and incense offerings. We also added a red kefir scarf as a way to honour, and actively grieve hundreds of our Palestinian murdered siblings and infant niblings by the Israeli state over decades.
Obsidian as an oracular technology of the dead combined with rose quartz historically as a healer of cataracts, and of the spirit, invites us to step into (sub)liminal multidimensional spaces of reunion with the parts of ourselves we have forgotten, lost, or been hijacked from us.
We become interconnected extensions of each other, in which, "separability becomes dissolved" (Denise Ferreira da Silva).
Estranha
“On the margins of the inexpressible they shall find a common tongue”
— Sall Lam Toro & Suziethecockroach (video work ODLL 2023 + voice over for this rework piece)“Que estranha forma de vida! “
— Caetano Veloso (“estranha forma de vida” fado song version)
Glitches, unintelligible vocal rhythms, subliminal messaging and the embrace of our constant state of being (and becoming) ‘out of time’/existing outside of this time are central aspects to the surrealist performativity of the bodies and ghosts that live in this universe. These glitches represent anarchic failures we author as bodies that choose to leave compulsive capitalist-abled-heteronormative-patriarchal scripts on a daily basis within our forms of relating to each other, ecology and the wold.
The walking and moving backward aesthetic also made a comeback with pole dance movement as to enter spirals of desire and transformation in the ground and air.
Erotica
“Reentering your life from an erotic place”
— Sall Lam Toro & Suziethecockroach voice-over
The erotic abundance of this version grew out of a deep desire of seeing sensuous platonic love between black queer bodies when we experience terrifying illusions of being separate in a neoliberal colonial economy-based society.
We invited black and mixed-black audience members to sit in the front row, and brought one of them to sit in our neon chair as to receive a lap dance while repeating the mantra: “I choose me; I choose you, I choose us” pointing at this fully black two front rows with seated audience in the room.
This version invites the audience, and specially the black audience in the room into an active role of “receiver” of an erotic lap dance by both performers at the same time as a way to share this platonic love letter that is this piece within a collective space. There is an active claiming of and centering ‘blackness’ as something we choose to be close to as part of our individuality and collective consciousness .
E, ultravioleta
Black light causes mayhem - it works through that which it makes shine
Black light breaks through
Black light dissolves separation
Black light breaks the codes
Black light unthinks the world
Black light, black light, black light
We worked with ultraviolet lighting throughout the piece as a way to speak of black light as a metaphor for being a black body that seeks to be unapologetically black in an eternal relationship to land as a diasporic body. Yet also within a mode of use of blackening as a technology that is both a dramaturgical device for moving in, out and within darkness, black outs and frenetic blue-purple light strobes with the contrasting neon orange and yellow outfits, highlighting the fractals/glitches’ as metaphors (influenced by the writings of Denise Ferreira da Silva on fractal thinking) within our histories on earth as black queer colonized (hijacked) bodies within a long duree type of event; that is, decomposed, atemporal, out of space, and in dialogue with the lives of our ancestors in the past, present and future.
Outside, when the night is thickest
We shall mouth the word ‘blacken’ and let it sit under our tongue
and when you dare saying that our tongues have been cut by history
We will just say that we stopped speaking to it
— Sall Lam Toro & Suziethecockroach (voice-over)
What creates a fractal according to Denise Ferreira da Silva is an interruption informed by our volition to render ourselves fugitive of, and in constant refusal of coloniality/modernity, and our commitment to ‘going down’ or put differently, a commitment to the end of life (as we know it, namely, its violence).
Concept creation, development, artistic direction, performance, sound concept & choreography: Sall Lam Toro
Co-development, co-performance, & co-choreography: Suziethecockroach
Choreography consultant & assistance: Iberê Araujo
Sound remixing with djing: Suziethecockroach
Sculpture work: Sall Lam Toro
Scenography and light design: Bella Jensen and Sall Lam Toro
Styling: Sall Lam Toro and Suziethecockroach
The piece was presented at Huset Teater as part of the international performance art festival IPAF within the theme “managing discomfort” curated by warehouse9, Toaster cph and Live Art Denmark between the 14 and 15th March 2024 and was produced by the curating institutions and Danshallerne.
Video documentation courtesy of Live Art Denmark.