extimité is a performance recorded with the photographic medium. Using my body and the bodies of past and present lovers, I explore the capacity of a body to be simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar, erotic and physiological, while navigating an uncanny space between surveillance and intimacy.
The performance, occurring in a private space between two people, involves inserting a pinhole camera into my vagina, directed outward. The long exposures subject the film to the movement of breath and viscera. The receptivity of the film as material is in direct conversation with the position of the camera in a receptive orifice of my body. It is a collaborative process of becoming vulnerable and surrendering control.
As the light reflected from the male body enters mine it is distorted by my internal movements. The resulting image is an exploration of the inter-penetration of interior and exterior; in terms of physical energy, form, and psychological relationship. I am concerned not just with the inversion of these terms – internal and external – but with the disintegration of rigid definitions as one merges into the other in an ever evolving play. No longer in an exclusively somatic or visual space, the performance creates a dynamic that includes both; one where they can no longer be separated.
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