To Own Your Own Joy
performance
To claw out of our monstrous bodies
Burn the cocoon and lick the ashes
Spit in the face of terror
As a final lullaby
Burn the cocoon and lick the ashes
Spit in the face of terror
As a final lullaby
A white figure stands before a mirror, fangs bared, a tail reminiscent of a horse’s trailing slowly as they step through the room. In To Own Your Joy, Gucheva recites a poem of their own, accompanied by the sound of Benjamin Schoones, the voice altered and deeply harmonised until it sharply fills the space. The figure is tender in one moment and feral in the next, and the piece builds until the norms of the venue give way and a truth breaks loose as a scream: I own my own joy.
In their writing Natalija found a point of departure in Goblin Market by Christina Rossetti, a Victorian poem of temptation and sisterhood whose two characters have long been read as desiring one another. That reading became fertile soil for an expression of their own, a personal truth on gender and sexuality and the freedom entailed within. To be met daily with the pressure to conform to heteronormative norms is an ordinary condition of queer life, and the performance offered an escape from it, even a temporary one. The costume, woven together with Alexis Gerlach and Aidan Abnet, carried this search for identity into the body, its animal elements standing at once for the constant mutation and shifting between codes that queer life asks for, and for the monstrosity that society projects onto it. Rather than flee that monstrosity, Gucheva claimed it, letting grief turn to anger as an active and transformative force, a means to voice rage and to fight back. This is where autotheory drives the work, subjectivity and criticality entangled, memory spoken from an internal voice and so not revisited but lived again.
The performance was part of cosmoVISIONS, a gathering of performance and visual art around queer relations between human and other than human life. In place of a linear view of time and progress, it proposed a reading in which past and present are not kept apart and the future acts among them, reaching back towards forgotten practices and the knowledges of spirituality and magic they carried. Within that frame, a single body speaking its own truth became a way of asking how the intimate might resonate in a wider collective.
Medusa offspace, Brussels, 2023