Kira O’Reilly
Be-wilderment (Nature Drag)/ translation ?
2017
live performance / material remains
Rather than indulge in questionable polarities of artifice and nature, this work seeks to perform a version of nature as a performance, a kind of drag; glity, glamorous, glittery and most definitely post-natural. Drag in performance traditionally refers to cross dressing, and gender when viewed from the perspective of social construction is then also seen as a performance of kinds. This artwork plays with puns; the literal drag of the dress’s fabric is made of plastic, scale-like sequins, plastics whose origins are in the petrol chemical industry, materials whose material ancestry links to carbon, the organic – the natural. Glitter, with its twinkling biomimicry of scales, minerals and natural affects. The salmon of knowledge, interspecies kin, embodying on our ambivalent relations to the wild and the unwild, and our states of bewilderment, be-wilderment. And knowledge, what knowledges might be explained or learnt with and from this salmon body?
Kira O’Ŕeilly (IE/FI) is an artist and leads the MA program for Ecology and Contemporary Performance at the Theatre Academy in Helsinki. Her practice, both wilfully interdisciplinary and entirely undisciplined, stems from a visual art background; it employs performance, biotechnical practices and writing.