mothertongues is Kim Ye & Meital Yaniv
Through collaboration, mothertongues creates a sphere of authorization to exercise communal frustrations, aspirations and fears using our bodies as objects of resistance. Like jazz musicians, we employ a call and response technique to augment one another’s intuitive decisions in the performing, filming, and editing process. Tears, laughter, joy, pain, vulnerability, and bravery co-mingle through mental and physical interpersonal explorations. As amatuer scientists, we run experiments of desire on ourselves and each other, observing and documenting the chemical reactions that occur between elements. In recording our findings as specifically and subjectively as possible, we create a fiction that speaks the truth.
Vocal Transplantation is a performance, a therapeutic exercise, and an experiment in trust. Taking the bureaucracies in which we circulate as our starting point, we point to the limits these systems impose upon our expressions of personhood. As a strategy to combat a structure that draws its power from the ability to categorize, we blur our identities by wearing opaque black bodysuits that shift our specific identities into generic silhouettes. In this state, we voice words that we cannot put on the record. Filtering our expression through the surrogate body, we bypass immigration and litigation surveillance. Our tentacles connect us, and our glasses illuminate to the rhythm of one's own words spoken by the host’s voice. Like an incubator of secrets, we express our unmonitored and unsupervised truth.
In PSA (Self-Brainwash Meditation #404), we engage with issues of struggle revolving around women’s bodies as a dominant and dominated site. Building off historical portrayals of rape as something done to women’s bodies, we postulate a contemporary mode of understanding of rape as something done with women’s bodies. Combining a public service announcement (PSA) and guided meditation into a single form, this video blurs the line between fantasy and reality to propose potential tactics that can be used to empower those who may find themselves on the receiving end of such aggression. Taking from the principles of aikido, where the practitioner defends themselves while protecting their attacker from injury, this work envisions how to weaponize the power of surrender. By exploring the difference between experiencing a traumatic event and an identity built upon victimhood, we suggest alternative ways of resistance in which one’s vulnerability becomes one’s greatest strength.
Untitled (Owl experiment #101), is a 5 minute 46 second a single-channel video in which the artists abstract their bodies through obfuscation and costume exchange to explore the physics of pleasure through a DIY purple vibrating owl. Set in a blank space outfitted with only a bench and wrestling mat, the artists position their bodies in different configurations, tetrising themselves and their desires in an attempt to reach a transcendent place of mutual pleasure. In this mundane space, bodies cultivate intimacy on their own, placing themselves outside of both romantic and pornographic contexts. In contrast to popular queer representation, the viewer’s pleasure is set aside in lieu of a more honest expression of pleasure and climax.
The purple owl used in this performance is deconstructed in front of the camera, exposing its construction and transformation as a custom, handmade tool. Independent of the video, the purple owl is a relic that represents the fantasy of total individual fulfillment while being in connection with another. Through a process of bricolage involving pieces of pre-existing sex toys–i.e. vibrating bullet and fleshlight–encased by a children’s balloon, the new creation informes the bodies on how to interact and move with one another.
