Abstract
This chapter explores how performance and photographic art that reflect feminist and ecological values contribute to political understanding of the human and the nonhuman . It argues that body-based performance can draw attention to how the environment is always phenomenologically perceived through the body’s sensory and emotional processes. Performances and photographs by Australian artists Jill Orr and r e a (Gamilaraay), in which ghost-like humans with ambiguous social identities haunt darkened and fire-affected nonhuman spaces, deliver complex postcolonial perspectives. In this interpretation, an eco-phenomenological approach builds on ideas of feminist ecologies and the concept of a shared natural world envisaged by ecofeminism, as it points to the possibility of unravelling the power relations of dominance. While emotionally felt responses towards the nonhuman potentially provide a galvanizing force for protection of the environment, performance and art facilitate awareness of troubling emotional contradictions and of the body-self’s patterns that underlie human dominance.
Notes
- 1.
The artist r e a writes her name in all lowercase with a space between each letter. This is the artists’ professional name used to make reference to her practice, which examines the colonization and categorization of the (colonizing) English language.
- 2.
- 3.
I viewed the photographs at Jenny Port Gallery in 2012 but filmed the live performance at the Venice International Performance Art Week, Palazzo Bembo, Venice, 8–15 December 2012.
- 4.
Orr in conversation with the author, 22 January 2016. Gypsum is used for plasterboard.
- 5.
I worked with r e a in contemporary performance group, The Party Line, in the 1990s, and she continues to work with performance director, Gail Kelly, for some of her art works and for PolesApart .
- 6.
Even though the whole art work is the film, photographs and autobiographical commentary, only the filmed performance was presented in the Art Gallery of NSW in 2015.
- 7.
Conversation with the author, 30 April 2015.
- 8.
One of the most controversial environmental issues in Australia in the twenty-first century is the extent to which controlled burning is able to prevent the new type of catastrophic bush fire that killed 173 people on Black Saturday, on 9 February 2009. These catastrophic fires are being attributed to climate change . It has only recently been understood more widely in Australia that Aboriginal people managed their environment over thousands of years through the careful use of fire.
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Tait, P. (2018). Performing Ghosts, Emotion and Sensory Environments. In: Stevens, L., Tait, P., Varney, D. (eds) Feminist Ecologies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64385-4_10
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