thresh/held
performance to video
4:04 mins
2023
This performance engages feminist frameworks that understand the body as shaped through repeated acts of orientation, endurance, and negotiation. In dialogue with Sara Ahmed’s writing on persistence, strain, and the labor required to inhabit space, the work examines how boundaries are formed, maintained, and contested over time.
Anchored by a garment fixed into the ground, the performance begins with an act of release that quickly becomes entanglement. As the fabric is pulled, strained, and gradually torn, the body is drawn into sustained physical labor—each attempt to create space producing new constraints. Movement becomes effortful and cyclical, foregrounding the often-invisible work required to navigate conditions that resist change.
Rather than presenting rupture as liberation, the work emphasizes the instability of progress. Acts of protection, healing, and self-definition emerge as ongoing negotiations shaped by pressure, repetition, and lived experience. The gestures accumulate without resolution, marking endurance as both a survival strategy and a form of resistance.
By making this labor visible, the performance reframes healing not as a private or linear process, but as one conditioned by broader social forces. It invites viewers to consider how bodies persist within—and push against—structures that continually reassert themselves, and how even partial movement can carry collective significance.