“Hollow Spaces” was created for the conference “Occupying the In-Between” to promote discourse about the labor required to occupy exhaustive identities and the methods that can be used to create spaces of rest, as generated by embodied knowledge. The performance was created during the lockdown in the UK specifically for the platform Zoom, utilising the virtual background video function to inhabit and interact with a hybrid eco-digital stage.

The following words guide me: “Through a ritual of light and breath / I reassess the process of a changing body / within an expanded temporal context / Surrounded by mineral formations / - magnetic attractions - / I discover fleeting moments of rest / Healing is allowed / existence is hollow.”

The drone sound of Body Fool holds the space for the ritual to unfold. The background video shows close-up footage from the depths of a cave that I had been in the previous year. There was darkness, mineral formations, and an inorganic garden of moist rocks. I take small pieces of paper with words written on them and stick them on my arms and my face. When my arms and face have been covered, I stand up and bring a glass bowl of water with a tea candle floating in it. I unstick the little papers and place them above the candle. The paper catches fire and the words vanish. I burn the words one by one and throw the remains in the bowl of water.

The sound, the video and the livestream act reach the spectators in different parts of the world. With me stays the flame, the water, the paper, and the burning smell.

The demand for visibility is the flip side of identity politics. Transgender and gender nonconforming people inevitably possess a great share of the demand. With “Hollow Spaces,” I turn inwards to find places of rest.