Every Exit is an Entrance
In a small pale room, an adjunct to the main house, four young women kneel on cotton, their shins pressed to the cold tile floor beneath it and them. They are dressed in white off-ish, peachy, starched cotton, rough linen, some kind of lace; it falls around their body the way their hair does strawberry, brunette, burnished blonde. They are facing one another, working in the round. Their hands work like this:
Eye to hand, hand to eye to - stitch
Match lit repeat Eye to hand, hand to eye to - stitch
Eye to hand, hand to eye to - stitch
Eye to hand, hand to eye to - stitch
Eye to hand, hand to eye to - stitch
They think of their mothers darning, perhaps even inhabit their posture but the thread is scarlet and they stitch a language with it. 'Every Exit is an Entrance' -- one writes, not far from girlhood, nor womanhood, caught between its folds. To move across time from girl to woman is to land in the place where payment is taken. A woman may pay atten-tion - as audience, carer, reader - but is not expected to appear, and so loses her platform to demonstrate. A girl, taken up with the act of appearing, is less free to act than to be an icon for action by others. They - by which I mean - we -- have reached an impasse: to exit girlhood is to merely re-enter girlhood a woman, this is what she's saying. It is a toxic hood-ness - a hood that cloaks the eyes from reality rather than protection from the rain.
When the work is done, the young women lift the nine dresses that are stitched together roughly at the seams and in the round. It is early in the day but it is hot and sweat smarts the cotton where their spines have been. As they cross the yard and round the house towards the cool blue of the pool, they do so slowly, careful to keep in step, and as they do so slowly, they re-enter their mother's womb - a time before the cerebral - and there they grieve for it. Their movements become a funerary procession, not cool or cold or dark but noticeably silent; not even a blade of grass flickers. When the four women reach the cool pool they submerge the round of dresses into it and the whites become themselves blue and transparent and their hands become the hands of our mothers and our grandmothers and their grandmothers in the domesticity of labour (or vice versa). They enter or we enter. 1 Joanna Walsh, Girl Online: A User Manual (2021)
The performance was based on a research funded by the residency #TakeHeart by FONDS DARSTELLENDE KÜNSTE and FFT Düsseldorf