Description
This piece only works with your participation so if you are coming along please bring along the following items: pen/pencil and paper for writing/drawing/noting down responses, a citrus fruit, sterilised empty jar, spoonful of sugar or honey, fresh herbs and cucumber (both optional), water.
‘Touch Hunger’ is a participatory live art show about queering touch in a pandemic, presented and performed by Ali Hannon and Clare Plumley in the gardens of the Friends Meeting House for Brighton Fringe in 2021. This is a collaboration informed by two spoken word pieces written in response to our own touch hunger. It has both live and remote iterations. The first version was created for an online event run by Islington Mill in Salford called “Tender Hotel” in February 2021.
Our questions at the time were: how might we queer touch and expand our sensory bandwidth during this time? Are there other sensations which have arisen or which we can cultivate in lieu of the touch of others, what ‘more than human’ entities might we develop a touching relationship with and do these experiences come close to meeting our needs? What is the action that food has on our bodies, on our emotional well- being, what role does metabolism have within trauma? What is or is not nourishing for our systems? This project explores the edges of our bodies in relation to others, the screen, the food we ingest and our microbiome. And whilst touch restrictions have lifted there’s still a reticence and charge around it, and the new ways of engaging remotely which emerged feel like they’re here to stay. So we’re also playing with remote intimacy and the gap of longing within online interaction.
The first written piece is one of touch deprivation during Lockdown, an erotic fixation on food fuelled by a longing for human connection, a recollection of the ingested trauma of homophobia and a lost love. This forms the basis for the live experience which brings food items from the story into a physical space for participants to touch, ingest and make into a ferment followed by a one to one improvised encounter and spoken word from Ali exploring human intimacy.
We are presenting the act of eating and fermentation here as an exercise in interspecies kinship between ourselves, our food source and microbiome, our gut and emotions and/or trauma, and it’s purpose in relation to written piece ‘eggwash’ specifically is to close a healing loop. It’s a relationship which continues beyond the life of the piece as participants continue to monitor then drink their ferment over subsequent days.
We have a desire to keep people regulated, embodied and connected as much as possible, so participants are in touch with natural, tactile, fragrant or analogue materials for most of this workshop whilst also being engaged with us and/or each other onscreen.