#plus its not even the violence and stuff that makes maria's death so impactful

[sonknuxadow]

ive seen a lot of people say that a shadow focused movie would have to be rated pg 13 and theres no way of making it appropriate for a kid audience. and idk i have to disagree. yeah the story is probably gonna involve darker subject matter than the first two if it takes a lot of stuff from the games but i think whether or not its pg or pg 13 depends on how much is shown. there have been a few different portrayals of maria's death over the years but none of them are particularly graphic and what happened to her is mostly just implied rather than outright shown in detail. i think they could easily just have a shot of a soldier holding up a gun then cut to shadow as the gunshot sound plays and then cut to maria who is visibly injured but with little to no blood showing and get away with a pg rating. not saying a pg 13 rating is impossible but i dont think its an inevitable thing that has to happen in order to portray shadow's story correctly either

[katherinemacbride]

tongue breaks inhaling

Script for performance at CCA Glasgow, February 2019. With many thanks to Angelica Falkeling, Anna Frei, Clara J:son Borg, and Raluca Croitoru.

THE END OF THE WORLD (KATHERINE) 

There was an idea here of a fictional future, one that imagines a different kind of life.

There was that time in Athens thinking about how one plus one equals many things and a plus b does not equal c or d or anything simple and straightforward. The thing that struck me was the relationship to time, how the rocks were present in modernity making modernity itself be just a blip, a temporary reality, nothing more. But those rocks signified something else, they signified the beginning of modernity’s love affair with itself, the foundations of white privilege, the recasts of statues white and uncoloured denying the truth of their making time, communities accommodating difference around places that are now separated as Africa, middle east, europe. Communities of fascists situating their power in the past, a divine right to make whiteness out of Black death, Jewish death, Roma death, sometimes a while ago Italian death, Portuguese death, Irish death. A female politician being punched on live tv by a member of a fascist group, nuanced strategies to tackle domestic violence, pragmatic and magical approaches to crisis, her dad who can’t afford his health insurance and self medicates with the gym until the pain is too much, people with stuff and no money, people with no stuff and no money, international education, discrimination in the north, being paid less than minimum wage in London, 

I finally read ‘Woman on the Edge of Time’ in 2017, I knew it from Emilia who helped make this performance what it is today in their role as a friend and their role with Collective Text.

In Marge Piercy’s book she writes of a future where things are decided communally, where the earth is a respected and loved and cared for host, where work is shared according to ability, child care is de-gendered and genetics are shared, difference is valued and appreciated, pleasure is had, struggles continue, empathy and awareness of the body’s capacities are high, colonial reparations have been paid, resources are not expropriated, when people cannot get on they are asked to talk until they find something, anything, they have in common. A book of small details, a future interspersed with a 1970s present where structural inequality forces poverty, violence, forced infertility, and psychiatric pathologisation of resistance onto the character. In the end, to fight to make the future happen she loses her sensitivities, has to cut off her pleasurable possibilities of travelling to the future. Time is entangled not linear.

I can’t write a fiction now because it isn’t true. I think it would be dishonest. I’m not sure if a white European person can write visionary fiction or if her attention is better allocated to acknowledging historical and present realities. Decolonisation happens in stages—critiquing the structures, imagining others, making change—and maybe I wanted to jump some. The last remaining rescue boat in the Mediterranean just had its flag removed, likely after Italian government pressure on Panama. EU money has been spent on detention centres in Libya where detainees are tortured. Insect societies have collapsed in the changing temperatures and pesticide induced soil sterility.

But I did want to imagine a present with some different turns in the past.

What happens in this story? Four women are invoked across time. Four women meet. Here. Somehow. Or do they need to when they can affect each other across the distance of time without simultaneously existing in similar forms—with you in particles if not mass—having been breathed out.

I only just realised the connection between the past and present that a perfect tense signifies in grammar. Pasts have consequences. In relationships, trauma and joy and previous life manifests. Across generations even. My body is impacted by your previous behaviours. Your body is impacted and constructed by my present and previous behaviours. I exist because you starved. I exist because they were killed. We exist temporarily in this mess, my bones made from cosmic material brought to earth on a comet, my body either a form of carbon capture or carbon release depending on burial or cremation, and what kind of coffin I might get. My body borrowed on borrowed time, owing to everyone and everything else. 

What would it be to be so vulnerable? What would it be to be so supported? What would it be to feel me feeling you and to be okay with the momentary understanding that comes in a glance and the lifelong misunderstanding that comes in a culture.

What kinds of sensitivity might be expected, might be appreciated, might be valued?

What ways of knowing?

SAPPHO (RALUCA)

Sweetbitter mythweaver.

Making her own language, finding words to sing about female solidarity and friendship and sex and intimacy and care as being together, and not being commoditized. An ambiguity of language too complex for later scholars needing to define her as lesbian or not lesbian, the simplifying of structures of living and feeling that we don’t imagine, the same words she made coming to a patriarchal use meaning non-married female lover of a married man. 

She comes to us through citation in treatises on grammar or style. She exists in other peoples’ paraphrasing although her work is the substance of memory. The structuring forms being grammar and rhythm, she would break the rules of the grammar to fit the rhythm, change the sounds of the words, make elisions, contractions, cuts and edits where certain moments of material could be held between the audience and the people singing the line, notes bending, material stretching, the whole being considered always and the parts adapting. I move you move we move. Talking and seeing the constellation of your thoughts makes mine move and they’re all flying around changing, being changed. Changing, fusing, and fragmenting.

Distress causes the tongue to break.

On this ground we are walking.

MARIA (CLARA)

I could only reach her by touching her work that time and she’s far away in the just-pre-internet graveyard of the female-unwritten-about so here’s a story of ears and hands, listening and touching.

If they’re both there, are they both being touched? Could they sleep like that?

Like that one time you slept in a bed with someone and you both held each other and woke in the same position as when you fell asleep. Would that be possible with the ears?

End of the world for night, resting the organ that can’t stop sensing. Give it some rest with those hands. Tiny massage points. A special kind of cartilage, flesh in between the densities of hard and soft. 

If it was just the ears and they were the whole body they could hold each other maybe?

But the pleasure is also in the hand that holds. A handle like on a climbing wall. A shape made for the human hand to feel good holding it and one it can hold in sex and in non sex like when you gave me massage in a sad time and I never had someone who wasn’t a lover touch them like that. You hear me?

MELINA (ANGELICA)

imagine there weren’t the same types of shyness 

what would the future look like then?

the same types of shame 

shame of being ashamed

of intergenerational shame

shyness as vanity they say 

shyness as fear of losing whatever power you have

shyness as downgrading whatever capacities you have

shyness as a refusal to take a risk

shyness as a necessary safety device for one exposed to unsafety

shyness as internalisation of the feeling of being wrong

having the wrong body, the wrong ideas, the wrong intelligence,

the wrong interests that comes from perhaps a fear of conflict

perhaps too much prior conflict

LENA (ANNA)

She and we are made of time. The geological time that records the actions of all the ancestors into the ice.

ENTANGLEMENT (ALL)

Being breathed out, having been breathed out, inhaling, breaks