This piece explores the ways in which our criminal legal system and our society at large criminalizes our bodies, especially marginalized queer femme bodies. Through a combination of live looping, electronic musical story-telling, and dance, the piece questions the concept of safety: who has the right to define it and experience it? Who is inherently deemed unsafe? Who is our system built for and who was it designed to benefit? Who was it designed to alienate and push out?

The piece takes the audience on a journey through the physical and psychological oppression of our current system, grieving the losses experienced at its hands, into a space of reimagining, breaking down what exists to create space for something new.

While Emily live-loops sounds, vocals, and recordings invoking the suffering and institutionalized burdens imposed upon queer femme bodies, “the system is not broken, it’s doing what it’s meant for”; Salomé dances blindfolded, with her left hand immobilized while the right is imposing its predominance and control. Finally, through the invoking of names of the lost lives of queer femme bodies, healing vocals and movement of both hands, the blindfold comes off—calling on the understanding that we must reach as a community in order to uplift each other and build a real justice system.

This piece was presented as part of “Criminalize This!,” an exhibition about the social policing of gender and the criminalization of queerness.