HELIOCENTRIC DUO EXCHANGE (Sub-Dwellers Duo)

Performed July 2013 collab w/ Karen Constance

Text:

Quick and easy birth of a small, plastic 'baby' doll. The placenta extrudes shortly afterwards, whilst the doll is held to the breast, and lands upon a cushion of greys and browns that usually stays at the foot of the bed. The placenta is grey matter; slippery, blubbery, and has taken the shape of a hot water bottle (that also usually stays at the foot of the bed). There is no blood on it, nor is it composed of flesh or of blood. Not situated on the bed at home but that of S, who hasn't yet been encountered (and yet the doll has birthed here in her bedroom). Beside the doll-in-arms (it is wrapped in a brown towel and a white-ish baby blanket - that for four years stayed at the foot of the bed) is another, smaller doll dressed up in the costume of a matador.

There's a procedure that must be carried out. Firstly, a woman clad in white inserts a cold cream - with a pair of latex gloved fingers - into the vagina and spreads it around (internally) in order to numb or freeze my reproductive organs in preparation for the procedure. The procedure is to be performed by my lover, D. (I am menstruating in Sweden). Now we are in a car, D's mother is driving (she is called Lena but I can't pronounce her name). Two other people are there, in the car. I am in the middle. Someone is on the right; D is on the left. Looking forward at moving traffic. He begins by 'making me feel better', and inserts, suddenly, decisively, all fingers of a hand, making a three-dimensional diamond form deep inside my cunt. Occasionally the motions made with this hand shape produce waves of nervous-tense-pleasure that I know for sure herald the death of fertility. This is the procedure.

Supposedly there is a resistance. There is supposedly a bar in which meetings are held – down-town and down a staircase behind the station beside the dark arches by the stinking River Aire. I am accompanied by a camera crew dressed entirely in black. Hidden knowledge. Incognito. The bar has no signage – one has to be 'in the know'. The women appear to possess a studied, standardised gender-antipathy. Everybody exactly the same – cropped hair military garb young faces scrubbed clean. Crouching beside a woman who is making a sign like this: the pen-like contraption corrodes the material so the words appear gradually like a developing instant photograph. Or – words transformed into holes. Walk past the toilets, walk past the heaps of excrement piled up like banks of sodden volcanic sand, flecked (obscenely)with colour. Need to vomit. Leave. Forget about Susan and whatever happened to her.

In the flat from years ago that has since become shockingly gentrified – contemporary perspex objects jostle with a dramatic flat-roofed dolls house centrepiece. He lived here, She lived here. He lived here with another She. Now neither, and none, live here. Waiting with R for keys, so that they can be returned to the new place, half-an-hour from this place. It is 6am and the sun is creeping over the roofs of Hyde Park, endowing the redbrick terraces and household-waste-ridden concrete with a serene, blue-ish glow. Outside, by the door you open with an electronic tag of credit card-sized dimensions, a family speaks loudly in Spanish (not Portuguese). We stop for a cup of coffee in a busy café (R is now D). There is an unrecognisable man at the table who comments on the dream. “Time contracted” I say, “it became supple” (which is distressing). His comment reaches us from the midst of his rustling broadsheet newspaper: “In truth – you stole his best friend” and: “I never liked you anyway” and: “Personally I prefer Disco Girls”. A woman with blonde hair materialises in the immediate field of my visual perception, mid-air, clad in short-shorts and sequins, as if to prove his point to the inner eye of my rapidly magnified ego. Moving this way and that. Expanding and contracting. Filling the space, rushing across, swooping, gyrating. We leave and begin to walk across town. D is dressed is dark blue jeans, black sweater, black boots. He only exists from behind. From this position he is inspected. From this position I inspect him – the voyeur. There is a gated-off area (Adel woods) into which he climbs devoid of any trepidation – so both climb – and encounter the fluorescent-coat-clad security bodies turn 180 degrees in pursuit, so both scramble back over the low wire fence, straight into a congregation of further security personnel, and fashion models.