Performance & Sound (20 min.) by Panicattack Duo for Hold On, The Koppel Project, London, UK, 2020, Photography by Rocio Chacon
Daisies is a choreographed performance and a sound piece, where we embody our own cultural and ancestral divination practices. Naz has grown up in Istanbul surrounded by women who are nurturing the practice of tasseography (coffee telling) and Emily comes from a line of dream tellers in her Bulgarian family. Throughout the sound piece we are tuning into these female alternatives, whereas the choreographed actions are taking on the anarchistic attitude of the film Daisies (1966), playing with exaggerated scenes of embodying excessive greed, spoiledness and the absurdity of our world. Why are we delving into these practices and what are we trying to give rise to?
All over the world we can find examples of a strong connection to magic and the occult; Divination practices, mystical rituals, herbal medicinal processes. These traditional female practices have a deep relationship with the earth and understand that reality can exist and perform on different levels; spiritual, mental, astral, etheric and physical. These mystical practices are making a conscious effort of perceiving the earth and its beings as one living organism. This notion is crucial with all the division of opinions and separatism within the current climate. Viewing the planet and all of us on it as One is the only way forward to resist an antagonistic neoliberal way of being.
For centuries, before the industrial revolution to today’s neoliberalism, the patriarchal, euro-centric structures of our societies have made a conscious effort to diminish these practices for being superstitions, modern taboos or some kind of evil customs. Women have been laughed at, prosecuted, punished, imprisoned & burnt alive. If we look at the power structures and processes of the evolution of capitalism through the governance, domination & regulation of female bodies and their traditional and indigenous practices, it leads to argue that eradicating these practices was a condition for the capitalist rationalisation of work.
With capitalism came the end of the commons and other autonomous spaces that women came together to share knowledge, practices and creativity. Extended families and ways of living provided resilience in themselves because they were a supporting web. Moving from big, interconnected families of friends and lovers, which helped protect the most vulnerable people in society, to smaller, detached nuclear families (a married couple and their children), gave the most privileged people in society room to maximize and expand their benefits and opportunities. This system ultimately makes the rich more autonomous and devastates the working-class and the poor. With the nuclear family structure establishing its prominence, came the end of cherishing intergenerational female friendship and child care in a communal way. As contemporary women we have been trained to forget the visceral connections to each other and are bred to an antagonistic way of existence, where convenience, privacy, and mobility are more important. What we want to trigger is the memory of that intuitive sharing, compassion and empathy.
‘Magic kills industry’ once said Francis Bacon. The notion of magic as a threat to industry is significant in our times, where our capitalist industrial development has been unveiled finally; exposed to be the biggest danger to life as we know it because of its unsustainability. A danger that holds the potential of planet destruction and human extinction. Here is another pressing reason to understand why these female practices could be of importance in the exploration of approaches for moving forward to new directions of a green future.
Historically outsiders, what can women and their ancestral practices offer us today? What would it be like if the traditional practices of healing, herbalism, midwifery were brought back? What if we listened to the worries of those women about our future? Are there any matriarchal solutions? Through delving into these matters we don’t only want to remind or trigger that mindful awareness but we want to manifest a magnetic field that leads us to artists, researchers and minds that are involved in these conversations. We think there is a lot more to learn and understand, and we are only at the beginning of our retrospection.
Last but not least, Daisies plays with the male gaze of the female bedroom and the male expectations of intimate love and friendship. The sexiness and sensuality anticipated are broken, the naivety awaited is demolished. What is of surprise is the archetype of the wild woman that creeps out and proves that ‘the memory of our absolute, undeniable, and irrevocable kinship with the wild feminine, a relationship which may have become ghostly from neglect, buried by over-domestification, outlawed by the surrounding culture’ is imperishable and endless.