Josefina Camus, Elly Clarke and Clareese Hill

Dissolving identities on a burning planet

Document #7 - 27 Feb 2020

With invited specialist Cathy Wade.

Produced across three continents in non consensual collaboration with: Google, Ableton, YouTube, Facebook, Apple, Serena, David, Zoom, Skype, WhatsApp, Microsoft.

Filmed by Roux Malherbe

(The below text has links to further documentation. Please feel your way through it.)

Our burning planet. Where do I start and you begin?  When we talk, how is what I say mine, and what you say your’s? Is it any different when we write? How can we claim ownership? The body that I am collaborating with is an Afro-Caribbean American Woman. Some communities aren’t responsible for this crisis; capitalism is burning the knowledge of the communities that respect and take care of the planet. Keeping quiet those voices, burning the voice of the forest, the voice of the plants, the voice of the animals. Two thoughts, two ideals, two sets of behaviors, code switching, in one marginalized body. In our human condition we face the disasters of the planet. Our voices transcend and go beyond the human, to exchange blood, air, energy, circuits, molecules, with animals, flowers, critters, stones, water, lights and disappear or become a multiple being. How can we claim ownership over anything we didn’t invent ourselves? Language is inherited, borrowed, occupied, hacked. Just as is the land upon which we live. It is not ours. We only use it. And pass it on, like a virus. Pretend to mediate, to be a medium of these identities, living beings that are diminished.

Josefina Camus is a London based artist  and researcher originally from Chile. Her research concerns space alchemy. Involving visible and invisible matters, her work expands and connects the notiones of corporeality and environment. josefinacamus.com

Elly Clarke is an artist and PhD researcher at Goldsmiths, interested in the experience, role and value of the physical body in a digitally-mediated world. She explores this through video, drawing, photography, performance, audio, music, writing and community-based projects. And through #Sergina, a border-straddling drag queen persona, who performs songs and (often recycled) text, online and offline, across one body and several, about love, lust and loneliness in the mesh of hyper-dis/connection. ellyclarke.com 

The identity of Clareese Hill, Art Researcher at Goldsmiths University of London, is temporarily unavailable for downloading.

Cathy Wade is an artist whose work is concerned with how art can be created and distributed in collaborative partnerships and through the creation of commons. Her work seeks to understand the experience of contemporary conditions through exchange and collaboration with others. She runs Black Hole Club, Vivid Project’s artist development programme and the MA in Arts Education Practices at BCU. Current project MXBodySpaceMotioningThem invites womxn to develop work collectively that investigates queer methods for inhabiting, exploring and making a response to the spaces we walk through. www.cathywade.co.uk