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'Performing the ob skēnē: disorientating white radiance through conjuring spectral violence of the image' is a practice-based research project that considers images of the dead white woman in nature as a complex ecology of desire and violence. Thinking with the ob skēnē, a term that has been linked to the Greek ob skēnē (off stage) as 'violent acts in Greek Theatre' that were committed away from the eys of the audience' and 'kept out of public view' (Mey, 2016) my research considers how the ob skēnē of the image exceeds the white radiant body it represents through the invisible violence of its material production.Through a material inquiry of such images, from the Renaissance to the digital I propose that the ecology of violence can be widened further to extractive and racial capitalism.
Act I: All these glowing girls
In Tom Ford's 2016 film Nocturnal Animals (Dir. Tom Ford) a mother and daughter are found dead in the Chihuahuan desert. Their slim white glowing bodies are found entwined on a beat up red velvet sofa. The ob skēnē of this scene however, is the ‘Slow violence’ (Rob Nixon, 2011) of Las Maquiladoras, assembly plants that employ mostly young women and manufacture tech products along the Mexican border in the Chihuahuan desert. Whilst Walter Benjamin states that ‘there is no document of culture that is not also a document of barbarism’ (Benjamin, 2003b) tracing the barbarism of the digital technology industry has become more complex as it is ‘kept out of view’. To return to the ob skēnē as a theatrical device I propose a performance practice where verbal imagery reorientates the listener to the digital image as an object of invisible violence and brings representations of the radiant white body in death into crisis. In my performance practice the figure of Bambi emerges., she is a crossing body and through the desert she absorbs the dead and senses the violent effect of the tech industry on the landscape. The absorption of bodies or organisms into other bodies conjures the seething presence that haunts the frame, the femicide that has taken place in the area of the Chihuahuan desert
Act II: A Fallen woman digs through the wound.
In the wake of the catastrophic attacks of 9/11, New York City was becoming a new woman. Sarah Jessica Parker, in her acceptance speech for her Best Actress Award for Sex and the City at the Golden Globes in January 2002, a series that focuses on the lives of four wealthy white women gushed, “and to the city of New York, who is indeed the fifth lady”. Parker’s allusion to New York as the fifth lady in the wake of the attacks on the World Trade Centre proposed a shift from New York’s famous female emblem, the Statue of Liberty, whose presence is a symbol of the arrival of nameless people from all over the world, to the Twin Towers - the centre of trade and capital. In defence of New York City, now a fallen woman wounded, George Bush’s administration’s retaliation to the attack in the ensuing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan exemplified what Stephen Graham describes in ‘Vertical Geopolitics: Baghdad and After’, the Pentagon’s ‘fantasies of verticalized omnipotence’ (2004:20). This imperialistic ‘god’s eye’ perspective has led to what Lisa Parks has described as the emergence, in a post 9/11 era, of public and private space being ‘intertwined with vertical power as airwaves, airports air space, and orbit have been commandeered to support national security and defence’ (2014: 15). I propose an alternative response to the catastrophe of the attacks on the Twin Towers through a speculative subterranean journey. Taking the figure of New York City as the fifth woman in Sex and the City, using live text and video, this performance paper conjures a journey through the wound of ground zero as a tactic to disorientate the geographical imaginary of the site of the World Trade Centre as an emblem of the imperial power of the United States.
Act III: A star is born
In James Whale's 1931 Frankenstein, the monster throws Little Maria, played by child star Marylin Harris, into the lake and she drowns. Her death justifies the gathering of a mob in the town centre with torches, who will go on to chase the monster, through the green pastures of Lake Malibou in California standing in for Lake Bavaria, into a windmill where he will burn alive. To return to Ben Tillman’s assertion, a Senator in South Carolina, referenced by Angela Davis, who in Washington said at the turn of the twentieth century that when ‘stern and sad faced white men put to death a creature in human form who has deflowered a white woman, they have avenged the greatest wrong, the blackest crime’ (1981 ). The image of the green girl murdered is a figure that has haunted the imperial imaginary and her death justifies the further taming and brutalisation of any potential threats to that white body. The repeated consumption of this image has fed Empires and launched a thousand ships. The ob skēnē violence of this scene is the violent ecological construction of Lake Malibou, used as a stand in for Lake Bavaria for James Whale's film, Lake Malibou is a manmade lake which was made to accommodate and shelter an elite white ideology that saw itself as separate from the wider region of California, Christof Mauch in ‘Malibu California: Edenic Illusions and Natural Disasters’ (2019) states that Malibu is a ‘place for an Elite that shuts itself off from the rest of society’ (2019, 72) but that ‘nowhere in the United States are paradise and apocalypse quite so close to one another’ (2019, 74).
In my performance practice the figure of a girl transforming into a tree emerges, just as Daphne turns into a tree to escape Apollo, so Little Maria, to escape the monster, transforms into one of California's lynching trees. This figure conjures the violence entwined in the American landscape.
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Live Performance
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