SEEING THE TEMPORALITY OF IDENTITY
A lexicon
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With a background in theatre, and currently a shifting practice into performance-based video (or video-based-performance), my body of work deals with two main topics: temporality and identity. Constructing remarks on both the identity of the artist-in-transition, and on the general discourse going on around trans*identities. Most explicitly the work deals with the De-/Re-Construction of the nonbinary identity.
My entry point into this masters and my research has always been one of queer joy. In Whatever happened to queer happiness? (2022, 12) Brazil questions why so often queer stories are told through a lens of pain and trauma. As if being queer would be an inherently negative thing to happen to people, where the original meaning of the word gay is happy. In my work I want to focus on queer beauty, queer joy, queer euphoria and queer possibilities, even in times of pain or discomfort (such as waiting on medical transition).
The way I work with these topics is through the creation of poetic images, both on camera (or through the camera) and on stage. Sometimes this intertwines with poetic language, other times the silence creates the space for the audience to interpret what the skin speaks.
My practice and research are deeply entangled with my personal life, stemming on the lived experience of trans* nonbinary identity and the desire for medical transition. This entanglement causes me to engage with theoretical discourse in a conversational manner, and to bring my practice back into the theories I discuss. Part of my research is also dedicated to finding a balance between the entanglement of the personal story in my performance practice or a professional distance. In this lexicon I will therefore employ a rather informal tone of voice while taking you along in my way of thinking and (re)searching.
In Skin memories, Jay Prosser briefly mentions the relation between memories and identity in transsexual experiences. ‘I have described transsexual sex reassignment as an attempt to re-member through skin a sexed body that should have been’ (2001, 52). He goes on to state: ‘Transsexual skin remembers the fantasy that ought to have happened. (…) a body memory or fantasy that failed to materialize.’ (Prosser, 2001, 53). This struck me as a description that fits my work very well. Through creating close-up images, and so facilitating a meeting between the trans*gender skin and the audience, I hope to disclose this body memory that failed to materialize, but is hidden within this body.
I do want to place a critical note on Prossers work (words) though. After reading his book Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality (Prosser, 1998) I was strongly aware of the trope he often uses of the transgender person that is ‘born in the wrong body’ or ‘needs to shed their skin’. I personally reject this statement.
The problem with the narrative of transgender people being born into or trapped in the ‘wrong body’, is that I will never be in another. This narrative has been created to try and explain the experience of being trans* to cisgender people, but it does not fully encapture the experience. I am not trapped in the wrong body. I am trappend in a system that understands my body wrong. Even though I want to make changes about my body to better suit me, my body is not inherently wrong. I am trapped in this body that is read as female, even by my own brain, and that reading is what I’d like to escape from, not the body itself. The only way to truly escape the body is death, and that is not what I desire. Trans* people want to live and be visible for who they are. Sometimes it feels like one can only make themself visible by shedding this skin, getting rid of this body. But the thing I truly desire is to show the world who I am through this skin, as if translucent or tailor-made to fit me exactly like skin should.
So yes, even though there might be a fantasy about leaving this body behind, taking off this skin for a while, this is only to alleviate the discomfort until the time I can make the alterations I need to have this skin fit who I am. Then I will eagerly go out to show this same skin and wear it proudly.
These relations to temporality and identity manifest themselves through five key concepts in my work. I’ll go through them and relate them to past performances to explain how I use them in my practice.
The invisible time
The time in between or before the in-between. A very specific period of time in the trans* experience, where the majority of the coming-out-phase and social transition is done, but the medical transition has not yet begun. The time where the individual is still visibly resemblant of the gender assigned at birth, while they actively and vocally identify with another gender. Oftentimes this period of time, the in-between before the in-between of medical transition, is deleted from media. In stories, films, and even documentaries, this period of time is skipped for there is no big visible (or visibly emotional) transformation happening. The central theme of the invisible time is waiting to go on with the medical transition. In the Netherlands the waiting-list for an intake consult for medical transition is currently almost 3 years. This implies an invisible time of waiting, longing and discomfort, that is afterwards deleted from the (in)visible stories we tell about our selves, of 3 years.
My current work centralizes this invisible time and attempts to make visible the body and identity as it is now. Emphasizing the waiting, longing and (in)visibility of this moment and these bodies. The concept of queer temporality, as described by Halberstam (2005, 2), is essential in my approach to materializing the invisible time. Halberstam starts from the idea of an uncertain future (stemming from the AIDS crisis and the uncertainty of a tomorrow for gay men in the eighties), this threat of no future emphasizes the present and expands the potentiality of the moment. The invisible time acts as the opposite mechanism, where the promise of a different future is so strong, but it remains out of reach for a long time.
In BECOMING MY NONBINARY BODY (Kersbergen, 2022a) I approached the topic of the invisible time through live-video-projections and slow-motion actions. This performance is focussed on the waiting for gender-affirming care and the transitions that happen in the meantime. For the duration of 2,5 hours the body is in a constant slow transition, trying to break the mold of ‘being girl’, while the body (or body parts) are duplicated by live-projected images. The tools used in this transition are the same everyday items queer people use to express their gender; clothes, make-up, tape. Through the act of slowing down and multiplying the body with projections the invitation is created for the audience to truly see and observe the nonbinary body the way it is, right at this time, while waiting on medical transition. Emphasizing the temporal nature of identity, the body, and the created image and raising questions on the image one projects out into the world and what get’s projected back onto the body by the one perceiving. The fact that the camera and the projector were visible for the audience and the creation of documentation was an integral part of the performance commented on the making visible of this time that is so often hidden or later on erased from the public eye.
Nonlinear identity
Another way of thinking of queer temporality is the intertwining of past, present and future in every moment. When combining that theory with the suggestion that Kate Bornstein makes in the podcast LGBTQ&A, Kate Bornstein: The Future of Gender (2018) that gender is related to time, and changes over time, I came to the idea of the nonlinear identity. Identity as a construct that is not stable through time, but moves with us in different directions and through different temporalities. If past, present and future intertwine, then past me, present me and future me are also enmeshed through time, giving us the possibility to move through our identity in a nonlinear manner. This opens up the space for multiplicity as well as moving backwards in identity (getting rid of some parts or our identity) to then redirect. As children we have the potentiality to develop in any direction, and so there are a lot of possible future versions of us present. Growing up we take the child we were and all their experiences with us into the changing circumstances of our lives, which influences not only our present identity and actions but also shapes how we think of ourselves in the future (and so changing and reshaping the future versions of ourselves we can imagine).
Berlin, October 2022, a tiny theatre and where drag queen Nancy gives a performance-lecture.
She never thought she would be a drag queen.
She had always been a drag king.
An attempt to perform as the guy she failed to grow up to.
If I were to perform that, would I choose to be a king or a queen, I question myself.
An attempt to perform as the guy I failed to grow up to.
Or
An attempt to perform as the girl I failed to grow up to.
Which one did I actually fail?
A drag persona is a clear example of a constructed identity, shaped and molded by choice of the performer, but I would like to argue that our off-stage identities are also constructed. Maybe not as consciously chosen, and some parts we might not have a say in at all, but still they consist of an array of malleable parts that can be put together in many different ways. Approaching identity as non-static and nonlinear opens this possibility to de-construct identity and re-construct them in different ways in different times. Not resulting in an unstable understanding of ones identity, but in an approach of multiplicity and fluidity of identity.
In the performance PINK DRAG (Kersbergen, 2022c) I explored the concept of the nonlinear identity most consciously. Building a drag king persona rooted in the understanding I had as a child that girls should wear pink, (resulting in eight year old me trying so hard to be a girl I exclusively wore pink for over a year). Then to dismantle the external expression of this character on stage (undressing from layers upon layers of pink feminine clothing) while asking the audience to document any masculine expression they could find on my body with a photo-camera directly connected to a projector which showed the last taken image. Thus creating a representation of the child I was while simultaneously fantasizing about a more masculine future version of myself.
The camera as a time machine
A camera can capture a moment, freeze it, document a specific time. Through the images we can travel back in time to memories of (distant) pasts or bring imagined futures into the present moment. When video comes into play we can slow down time, speed it up or edit it in non-chronological ways to change the course of actions. The experience of time is radically different in video-format than in live performance work. Through the creation of images a moment can last ‘forever', while the nature of performance work is rooted in ephemerality. The camera is therefore not only a machine to capture time, but also to manipulate one’s experience of it.
This is how I approach the camera as a time machine, a tool to create stories where timelines intertwine. Where the past and future collide in an image. Slowing down time to make you feel the passing of every minute. Seeing how an image is created or destroyed or changed in any direction, and recognizing what changed in you at the same time.
It is important to me to have my practice of working with the camera be rooted in a feminist approach. This impacts the medium on all levels, from dealing with the gaze of the audience (and directing that gaze) to the way one moves through space holding a camera or the way language is constructed around image making. A lot of terms related to photography are very masculine, harsh, and even aggressive. To aim, to shoot, to capture. To present an absolute truth on how something happened while there is so much subjectivity and framing going on. I want to work with the camera to create a different perspective, to get closer to specific elements, to speculate about possibilities. Not to prove or fix anything, but to open up my experiences and provide entry into complex territories. Therefore my main focus is on the manipulation of the experience of time, rather than the fixation of a moment. In BECOMING MY NONBINARY BODY (Kersbergen, 2022a) the mechanism behind the manipulation of the experience of time was clearly exposed. Through the plurality of the body (projected into infinity) the tempo of the movement was accentuated even more, while at the same time the documentation of the moment invoked the feeling that this moment be saved into the future.
'To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have; it turns people into object that can be symbolically possessed.' (Sontag, 1973, 14)
Image making is seen as a means to acquire power over the subject, by presenting it in a certain way, through a certain lens, in a certain light, angle, exposure-rate, an so creating a certain narrative around the subject. In this way self-portraiture could be seen as (re)claiming power over how the self is presented and perceived.
Archiving transition
Archiving is an act that is inherently rooted in history. Transitioning is an act oriented at the future. Combining these is an act of actively creating the nonlinear identity. Honoring the past and bringing it into the future, while already imagining that future as radically different than the present. An example of this act is Nitzan Krimsky with their book ‘Boi, Song of a wanderer’ (Borsboom, 2014), an image-based timeline, documenting their transition into boihood. Through the images they present the reader gets a sense of both their experiences in the moments, but also the imagined future that lays ahead. This documentation of the fantasized future gets to the core of archiving transition. It is more than just the arch of changes the person goes through, but also entails the way the person changes their relation with the past and the possible futures again and again.
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A small poem I wrote that brought me to this idea:
A body in transition
Containing all family history, herstory, theirstory
Like a photo-album
Stories compiled to form a human
Now putting them together in a different order.
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My personal youth was extensively documented by my father who is a photographer. Multiple photo-albums contain the stories of different happenings, phases, stages, events, or mundanities I went through. These images contain different meanings to different people. Someone who does not know me, would probably see a little girl, whereas me or my family construct this same information into a child, without the specific gender-marker. Those images are all still there, in my past, and together with other aspects of my youth, serve as building blocks into the construction of my identity in the present. Adding to them the images of drag-personas I have created also takes them into an imagined/fantasized future.
Photographic- and video-graphic work is inherently linked to the idea of archiving because it brings a previous moment in time into the future. In TRANSITION TEMPORALITY (Kersbergen, 2022b) I used this aspect of video to archive a non-existing rite of passage into my nonbinary transition. Eight close friends and family members taught me how to shave my face on camera, inspired by the unofficial (and romanticized) rite of passage into manhood young boys share with their fathers. The work deals with showing a possible future action through a medium that is rooted in the past, the action has already taken place while it is being dreamed about to materialize in the future. The work deals not just with the documentation of a physical transition an individual goes through but mostly with the desire for that physical transformation in a moment where medical transition is not yet available to them.
Poetics of images
Images tell stories, so why can they not be poems? I believe there is a strong poetic quality to images in time. How their context changes, and how the relation between different images changes through the duration of them being put together. I don’t like telling stories, I like creating images that contain stories for the audience to create in their imagination. There is a poetic quality to that act, the story that is not told, the poem that only exists in the mind of the audience. Just like in written (or spoken) language, the poetics are not in the words themselves, but in the space in-between, the way they come together or fail to meet each other, the same applies to the poetics of images. It’s not fixed in the image itself, but in the way they collide, are put together, or how the space in between touches the audience.
Life’s matters lie around and within us as scattered shards. Taken only as shards they are but mere fragments of what was once whole. And yet, taken precisely as shards they lend themselves to continuous reassembly. (Stenke and Pagnes, 2020, 06:50)
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In their manifesto Poetics of Relations: A Manifesto on Performance-Based Filmmaking (2020) Vest&Page (Verena Stenke and Andrea Pagnes) describe their method of performance-based filmmaking. This approach to image-creation and composing of meaning through the emotional, through fragments of memories or through a reconfiguration of time is one of the main tools to get to the poetics of images. For, just as with words, the poetics of images is not found in the images themself, but in the gaps or the friction between them. In TRANSITION TEMPORALITY (Kersbergen, 2022b) these gaps and frictions were accentuated by adding glitches in the video-material, referencing the broken image of identity, the mashing up of past and future and emphasizing the incongruence between desire and reality. Resulting in a nonlinear poetic image-based narrative of this rite of passage.
Another side to this has to do with drag and the creation of an ‘image’ or ‘persona’ or ‘character’. This to me is an inherently poetic act, not building new meanings out of words, but building new meaning out of visible characteristics of gender expression. Putting them together in unexpected combinations, finding holes in our collective understanding of gender and challenging the narrative we all tell about ourselves.
REFERENCES:
Bornstein, K. (2018) LGBTQ&A: Kate Bornstein: The Future of Gender [Podcast]. 19 june. Available from: https://open.spotify.com/episode/5F0iOH5jFfTLcXYksJyVLS?si=CoWgKzEoRNyPMD89yZCL6g&utm_source=copy-link [accessed 9 november 2022]
Borsboom, A. (2014) Boi: Song of a Wanderer. Amsterdam: Borsboom Filmproductions.
Brazil, K. (2022) Whatever happened to queer happiness? London: Influx Press.
Halberstam, J. (2005) In a Queer Time and Place; Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York: New York University Press.
Kersbergen, S. (2022a) BECOMING MY NONBINARY BODY [Live performance]. Arnhem: ArtEZ University of the Arts. 20 January.
Kersbergen, S. (2022b) TRANSITION TEMPORALITY [Live performance]. Arnhem: ArtEZ University of the Arts. 4 July.
Kersbergen, S. (2022c) PINK DRAG [Live performance]. Arnhem: ArtEZ University of the Arts. 21 September.
Prosser, J. (1998) Second Skins: The body narratives of transsexuality. New York: Columbia University Press.
Prosser, J. (2001) Skin Memories. In: Ahmed, S. and Stacey, J. (eds.) Thinking through the skin. New York: Routledge, 52-68.
Stenke, V., & Pagnes, A. (2020). Poetics of Relations: A Manifesto on Performance-Based Filmmaking. Journal of Embodied Research, 3(1), 3 (26:55).