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How might performance serve as a means for facing ubiquitous trauma and pain, in humans and ecologies?
While reflecting on her multidisciplinary work Systems of Pain/Networks of Resilience, artist Meghan Moe Beitiks considers bodies of knowledge in Trauma Theory, Intersectional Feminist Philosophy, Ecology, Disability Studies, New Materialism, Object-Oriented Ontology, Gender Studies, Artistic Research, Psychology, Performance Studies, Social Justice, Performance Philosophy, Performance Art, and a series of first-person interviews in an attempt to answer that question. Beitiks brings us through the first-person process of making the work and the real-life, embodied encounters with the theories explored within it as an expansion of the work itself. Facing down difficult issues like trauma, discrimination, and the vulnerability of the body, Beitiks looks to commonalities across species and disciplines as means of developing resilience and cultivating communities. Rather than paint a picture of glorious potential utopias, Beitiks takes a hard look at herself as an embodiment of the values explored in the work, and stays with the difficult, sucky, troubling, work to be done.
Performing Resilience for Systemic Pain is a vulnerable book about the quiet presence and hard looking needed to shift systems away from their oppressive, destructive realities.
List of contents
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1: The Necessity and Danger of Empathy (Moment 1), with Audio Description by Katie Murphy
Chapter 2: Trauma & Theory: (Nebraska), with Audio Description by Emily Smith Beitiks
Chapter 3: Human/Non-human/More-than-human Relationships (New York), with Audio Description by Katie Murphy
Chapter 4: Categories, Stigma and Listening (Installation One), with Audio Description by Emily Smith Beitiks
Chapter 5: Failure that Lives in the Body (Portrait) (aka: "Androgynous [Gender] Queer White Wom@x#y!n Looks at Her Actions, Things, Feelings." This chapter is intended for privileged identities.)
Chapter 6: What I Can’t See (New York 2), with Audio Description by Katie Murphy
Chapter 7: Surrender (Moment 2), created with Katie Murphy
Chapter 8: Water and Other Obvious Connective Forces (Santa Fe), with Audio Description by Adam Harvey and photos by Jane Phillips
Chapter 9: Systems of Pain/Networks of Resilience (Exhibition)
List of contributors
Index
About the author
Meghan Moe Beitiks is an artist working with associations and dissociations of culture/nature/structure. Her work has been published in Performance Philosophy, Performance Research, Journal for Artistic Research, Unlikely Journal for Creative Arts, and World Futures. The last chapter of her project A Lab for Apologies and Forgiveness is a book with Candor Arts. She is currently an Interdisciplinary Studio Art Lecturer at the University of Florida.
Summary
Performing Resilience for Systemic Pain is a vulnerable book about the quiet presence and hard looking needed to shift systems away from their oppressive, destructive realities.
