FIX BIENNIAL 2021

CATALYST ARTS October 14th – 24th

Super Inclusion

A two week festival celebrating performance and live art from Belfast and across Europe, both online and IRL. All live events were free to attend where Covid restrictions were in place to monitor and limit audience numbers.

For FIX21 I made the durational Performance called ‘Keep Smiling’

This piece looked at the notions of endurance, repetition, domesticity, motherhood, anxiety, madness, technology, and the aftermath of lockdown. Endurance via the notion of keeping going. Repetition- as we spent a lot of the past year and a half on a repetitive loop.days are on a loop right now. Domesticity because of being at home, in my role as a parent, making the dinner and washing the clothes over and over. Motherhood and all that this word means. Anxiety like a rash creeping up your body. Madness as I feel it coming up my throat so often now. Technology because of how we must negotiate the relentless news and imagery we are bombarded with.

The piece also makes us think about the notion of masks, when we put on a rictus smile and how different smiles mean different things. The nuance of a smile with a threat behind it. How a smiley emoji is often thrown into a message as a way to balance, pacify, take the edge off a message. We’ve become lazy with our smiley application- is it used too much?

The piece is about keeping going, possibly when you should have stopped for a breather a long time ago. It’s a less comforting take on the festival theme of Super Inclusion, but nonetheless a relevant one as we have all gone through the same 2 previous years and we are all negotiating the strange times we live in now.

Images of the performance courtesy of Ben Malcomson.