Spaces Inside an Ontogenic Sliver

When I found out my mom had been sexually abused, everything clicked into place.
When I found out it was by her father, I made a trial.

The abuser, the victim, and the witness were all deceased when this family history was told. I needed to make the family meeting we’d never have.
I needed an exercise in forensic sensing, evoking a truth from its negative space, and avowing echo forms of evidence in the body of the next generation. I needed an experiment in social roles around secrets.

At Atlantic Center for the Arts Residency #169, I had a visual arts mentor, Claire Penetcost, and was working with the dancers under S. Ama Wray, and the writers under Terrence Hayes. This context enabled me to create a participatory performance work using all the forms.

Entering the space, attendees elected & situated themselves within roles on the sheet below, around the history of hidden sexual abuse. Their initial task was to confirm my grandfather's legacy by copy editing his obituary, but as I presented my case more avenues of action were added like designing a staircase to help all the victims of sexual abuse that hover in the corner of bedroom ceilings come down.

 It begins as a lecture on Harry Harlow's attachment experiments

Then evokes how emergency imagination emits from within torture using the referential instability of symbols towards creative emancipation

My role emerges as a monkey that makes it’s own mother, uncarcerated its cage, stole the fucking clipboard and reported my own research findings.

In the end the room was split in two:

the dog, the wind, the witness, and the ghost composing scores around me with attuned humming and time travel drawing and witnessing of evidence that finally now, counted and the others at the board table discussing externalizing costs and the liabilities to shareholders of upsetting the narrative of the molester's success. After that performance I threw up two generations' seals over silence.

I only needed half the room.