In their Interior (SA)
3rd November 2018, ACE Open
As part of their Sister Online exhibition Xenoblood launching on the 1st of November, artist collective In Their Interior hosted a zine-making workshop and LambdaMOO demo in ACE Open’s Front Room.
Participants contributed to the creation of a hand-bound ‘XenZine’ (pronounced zeen-zeen), made their own zines, or co-created with others. This communal and collaborative way of working is inspired by Furtherfield’s praxis of DIWO (Doing It With Others). The event invited participants to reflect upon kin(d)ship, queerness and the ties that bind us together via and beyond blood.
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What are we to one another? We live separately and together. WitchMum and Mum2.0 are a non-sexual assemblage of a larger assemblage, or what Lynn Margulis might call a ‘holobiont’ - in its micro and macro aspects. Together and separately we practise the creation of “home” through parenting/mentoring/witchery/domestic and emotional support/daily affective abour and the labour of care. We do this for each other and for others strangely attracted to this arrangement. Through these practices we provide a haven from, or extension to, the nuclear family unit, for outliers on the brink of that system.
We are open-platforming “family”.
If, as Shulamith Firestone suggests, “family” is too much associated with systemic violence to be repatriated as a concept, is the same is true for the concept of “kinship”? These are provocations to drive our experiment forward.
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IN THEIR INTERIOR
In Their Interior is comprised of Virginia Barratt, Francesca da Rimini and Alice Farmer. The performing avatars, the unholy trinity of Witchmum, Mum 2.0 and Precocious Meme Savant, have cooked, co-habited and coded as becoming-kin to instantiate xenofam, building affective bonds through which datablood flows. This queered approach to extensible and open family platforms generates intentional spaces for the reconfiguration of blood ties beyond blood types, and another mode of hexing Capital.
Images by Grace Marlow