{a prolonged rapture; the meeting of flesh, trauma, and ecstasy}

Focusing on topics straddling the sublime line between pleasure and pain, ecstasy and mortification, humanity and the imundo, we incorporate an understanding and certain reverence for Christian saintly sacrificial rituals into endurance-driven performance actions with kink aesthetics and a literary preoccupation with feminist subjectivities, cannibalism, and an embrace of the non-human.

Evolving elements in these performances include a speculum-assisted close investigation of the female body, performed by an upright, cockroach-like figure; the masturbatory shredding of a phallic vegetable such as the cucumber using pin-lined fetish gloves; and an insectoid “crucifixion” that climaxes with the transformative opening up of the sacred wound and consumption of its secretions.

Created for the Way of All Flesh conference at CUNY Graduate Center: “an academic conference that investigates the theoretical potentialities of investigating flesh without recourse to the reifying concept of the enclosed and enclosing body.”