in collaboration with Leah James
Performed in several locations over the course of 2014-15, as well as recorded for video and shown in the form of an installation titled ‘This Little Holy Place’
“As Hobrecker and James perform an abstraction of the marriage ritual, they reclaim the reiterative force of performativity to assign certain meaning to bodies, i.e. create certain forms corporeality and embodiment as viable. They call upon the ritual’s performative power to do a co-corporeal bond we can understand to extend beyond the performance moment. By taking up the performativity of the marriage ritual, they point to the reiterative powers of normative performatives, which constitute and uphold certain versions of gender, subjecthood, corporeality, and even matter.
In their corporeal stitching, they embody the “I do”, moving its reiterative power from language to corporeality. . .
When Hobrecker and James sew themselves together it is an act of collective corporeal becoming and a performative negotiation of embodiment as contingent upon exchange.
Ritual (Marriage) was performed numerous times throughout 2014 and 2015. As such the corporeal puncturing of the skin of Ritual (Marriage) can be read as a collective corporeal doing, which does not begin or end with a singular performance of connecting bodies. Ritual (Marriage) offers a literal, yet abstract opening of the body, one that opens and, at the same time, proposes a healing through stitching the body together (note here together in its double meaning). Hobrecker and James take up the needle and thread in an act of hurt and healing as they perform a re-arranging of their corporeality and corporeal limits.”
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Storm Møller Madsen, (Trans)Ing Body Art: Cutting Potential And Trans Embodied Labor (University of Copenhagen)