AF: I kind of like that we’re starting here. I like this idea of departing from the body, like that’s where my primary concerns are, though actually I think my primary concerns are social and about how we relate to each other. 

I think I’m one of these people that thinks ‘I am a body’, not ‘I have a body’, as though I were a consciousness inhabiting a vessel. Though in a way I am that and my perceptions are mediated through the experience of being a body, which can get pretty complicated cause I suffer with waves of dysphoria and alienation from my body. This feeling of not being a stable site, or at least being acutely aware of that instability, has affected the ways I go about making work. 

AF: I mean, ok, yeah, for sure. Yes. The viewer for me is an active participant that brings their own history and baggage to the experience and that shifts how different people make meaning from, and also attribute value to a work.

Images of liquidity for me have been a way of resisting definition, of existing in a bunch of different places at once. The ways that the CGI slime fractures the performers skin producing another skin, the skin of the screen, I guess came in part from a both academic and personal response to the ways that liquids were being used in adverts while I was graduating, which I was seduced by but also too old for and that complicated feeling of being implicated in something sticky by my own desires caught my interest.

I want to tell stories of pollution. There’s a sequence in Arthur Pita’s ballet adaptation of Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis’ where the young salesman Gregor Samsa dances his way through a metaphorical transformation into a giant insect alongside to performers in black latex gimp suits in a brown muddy spill from his feeding bowl on the floor. The psychology of that sequence says something important to me about the relationship between social and ecological abjection, about social and economic pressures, about our relationships with other species, and that I can’t keep living the way I have been.

AF: Around the time I was developing that work I had this accident on my bike and while I was laid up recovering I read William Gibson’s Blue Ant Trilogy which talks about feelings of alienation from the city in relation to technology and soft advertising in the wake of the fall of the Twin Towers. I also read Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy, which describes a process of coming to terms with unexpected biological processes caused by a forced integration with an alien race after an apocalyptic, Earth shattering war.

Essentially the alien Oankali wanted to mate with humans, through a third gendered mate, the Ooloi, who would join a male/female couple extending fine tendrils into both partners’ bodies, tasting them through the mycelia, simultaneously healing them at a cellular level and generating and enjoying a pleasurable coital hallucination.

These books kind of behaved as a vehicle for Butler to think about slavery, issues of gender and consent and also proposed a relationship between a toxic hierarchical masculinity and our approach to ecology, but I found something so profoundly queer and nourishing in the image of a non-binary fungal sexuality, in some ways I wish she could have gone further with the image, but I drew on it to produce the final ecstatic sequence of Janus Collapse.

AF: Thanks, I enjoy this question. I like thinking about this multiplicity of voices and tones, because yes, I guess I do perform these multiple roles, but I only really started writing spoken word for my videos three or four years ago. I’d been reading poetry by Marwa Helal (Invasive Species, published by Nightboat Books) and listening to talks by Catriona Sandilands, especially ‘Botanically Queer,’ and they offered me a route through the science fiction and body horror I’d been working with, and into a space to speculate on desire through interspecies entanglement. 

I know that sounds like a lot and it is. The idea of desiring other species, desiring plants, dancing with them, having the screen and the dancers moving across it ingested by mushrooms... it was supposed to collapse the function of the image, confirm the skin of the screen as a body in the room while presenting the performers’ bodies as porous, as something made up of many species, and this porousness felt unnatural, or denaturalising, queer I guess.

AF: Working together has been important to me since art school. I’ve worked as part of a couple of collectives and though honestly things have been complex because hierarchies did form along racialized and gendered lines and things (workload and resources) often felt pretty unevenly distributed. It was still pretty joyful at times. I don’t know if the material work I made within those group structures was worth much but the experiences did feed me and I wouldn’t swap them.

My practice now is still pretty collaborative. I’ve worked with Joseph quite a few times, in fact, we’re making new work together right now, and some of the performers I’ve worked with, including Joseph, Eve Stainton and Owen Ridley-DeMonick, all of whom I met through choreographer Holly Blakey, have gone on to collaborate together on different projects.

A couple of years ago, I presented a 30 min show for Radio 4. It was about making art for VR and I spoke with artist Rindon Johnson about bodies and representation. We talked about this experience, which is common in virtual reality experiences, where you look down and you have no body. You exist as floating eyes or something, in one respect, the perfect high Modernist viewer. I found this disorienting but Rindon’s experience is different from my own. He described his experiences of moving through the world and how freeing it felt not to have a body in this space, and that sentence hit me pretty hard.

I don’t know how he feels about this now or whether that exact sentence made it into the show but I remember feeling acutely, how differently we all navigate the same spaces and how identification, and more importantly visibility, isn’t just a ‘one size fits all’ issue of categorisation. It’s not casual, simple, or a certainty for everyone. For some of us, it’s something that shifts by necessity.