Cora Farr

‘Trans Futures: Bathing in the patchhaus’ was the third and final iteration of my curatorial masters project entitled ‘Trans Futures’. The first two stages were as follows:

‘Trans Futures: Fully Customisable Bodies in Fully Customisable Spaces’ (Stage 1 Context Review)

‘Extended Essay: The Performer, The Body, and The Machine: Trans Futures, Sound as Curatorial Method’ (Stage 2 Extended Essay)

‘Trans Futures: Bathing in the patchhaus’ as an overarching project encompasses the development of the patchhaus, engagement of artists, production and commissioning of artwork, recording of accompanying sound work, and production design. The project also includes a culminating exhibition of the commissioned work by artist Ashley Stefano, entitled ‘Waters of the Womb’.

This project was part of ‘Thinking Culture’, a cultural programme from the School of Culture & Creative Arts (Glasgow University)

Curatorial Statement:

A performer, in a video, in a soundspace, in an installation.

Prior to working together, artist Ashley Stefano and I had separately devised a curatorial soundspace, and video performance concept. We began a durative and collaborative relationship, our two concepts aligning perfectly and subsequently enriching one another. This synthesis is key to the way of working in this project, and reflective of the dialectical struggle upon which this curatorial project rests. The goal of this project was to create both an artistic synthesis between curator-artist and artist-curator, and a dialectical synthesis through phenomenological affect. The title of my year-long curatorial project ‘Trans Futures’ considers how to shift the conversation about trans bodies away from regressive, invasive and ‘hammering’ (Ahmed 2016) narratives and to introduce and discover conversations that trans populations are in control of. Narratives that are assuring of our place in a future, that are utopia-seeking, that are hopeful and progressive in nature.

Through a phenomenological-political lens, I employed sound as curatorial affect, in order to ‘hammer back’ an embodied narrative about trans and gender diverse bodies. Concurrently, my curatorial method, having always in some manner been rooted in affect, is more broadly concerned with audience. How to manage space and in this case sound, in order to narrow the gap between the artist’s vision and the audience’s perception and resulting emotion. This was the primary motivation behind commissioning Ashley Stefano to create work to sit inside a curatorial soundspace, in order to experiment with a collaborative affect, that could exhume emotion from an audience in a deep profound way. The work itself asks the audience to engage, to think, and to feel through listening, moving through space and watching, with sound and video working to call the other into question, to disorient and reorient through gesture, through reverberation, through distortion, through expression.

We invited the audience to loop the space continually, observing how their emotional response shifts as they walk through the multichannel and multisensorial field.

Artist Bio:

Ashley Stefano is a queer South African artist based in Glasgow , with a practice
spanning performance, video, sound, installation, production and curation. Ashley is
interested in the body language of tension and catharsis, and evokes the musicality and
serious playfulness of gesture to consider its functions as method of self-soothing and
symbolic activation. Through fragmented and speculative narratives, she
initiates opportunities for ceremonial and meditative contemplation of object as site
for emotions, dreams, connection, and memory

The Artist and Curator would like to thank and credit the following individuals for
their work on this project:

Sophie Mockridge- Production design
Stina Aldén- Photography (promotional and print) and runner
Gwendolin Kircali- Tech hand and runner
Iris May- Performer ‘Mother’
Ellis Bairstow- Photography (installation)

And for their mentorship, support, advice:
Dougie Kennedy, Charlie Hodgson, Simon Weins, Dr. Siôn Parkinson, Dr. Omar
Kholeif, Dr. Alexandra Ross, everyone at the GSA TSD department- particularly the
media studio, Stow metal workshop, TSD photography and Caseroom. Fee Cuimeanach,
Pete Murch, Brooke Hailey Hoffert, Francesca Zappia, Maggie Ashmole, Esther Stone,
Ella Woodcock, Alex Howey, Owen Speir, Anna Lewis.

‘Trans Futures’ is dedicated to Ashiq Khan who will be missed.