THEATER AND PERFORMANCE STUDIES WORKSHOP
Co-coordinators: Jamie Lee & Jennifer Williams
Faculty Advisors: Professors Jessica Baker & Julia Rhoads
PRESENTS
“Porography: A Micropolitical Performance Practice of Writing Pores”
em irvin, PhD Student, Performance Studies University of California, Davis
Monday, February 19th, 5-6:30 pm (Zoom)
Zoom: https://uchicago.zoom.us/j/98140773558?pwd=MFFYMWZPdjBnL0ExSDRjc0VoMHUxZz09
Porography is the practice of writing pores – tight spaces of a division, sites of knowledge production, and archives of border experience. It is a reimagination of engaging with borders, porous and malleable things. Porosity is the quality of a border, of divisions between, measuring porous worlds and their accessibility. Porosity is intrinsic to all things porous. The border of a body is porous, and a porous border is full of pores. Pores allow things to pass, providing passage. Porography writes these relations between those passing through pores and the pores of a boundary. Porography conceptualizes the pore as a performance space, mirroring how performers engage with and shape their spaces of performance. Porography is inspired by my work with ceramic material. Ceramic bodies, inherently porous, exhibit moments of border crossing as substances are ferried through the ceramic membrane, transcending from inside to the other side. It is a lived practice of navigating porous worlds – boundary spaces. I work with clay’s vibrancy in ways that crosses traditional borders of what counts as ceramic art. Porography presents a different kind of orientation to the material, one that values the agency of clay in terms of listening to its literally vibrant potential. Porography archives porology and the study of pores, a study that presents instances to wriggle a pore open despite feeling daunting at times. This guidance has been transcribed as a pore written in this micropolitical performative analysis and practice of decolonial interrelationality. Embodying the pore becomes a radical form of resistance and a means to challenge, access, and transcend closed, impermeable, and exclusionary boundary-spaces as a transdisciplinary practice.
Paper is intended to be read in advance, please access it here.