Johanna Ekenhorst
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Open enclosures: a woodchopping performance
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Body Languages 1: Woodchopping
As part of An outline of a movement I’m presenting two strands of my ongoing research into woodchopping and (female) masculinities which has materialised as text, performance, a workout workshop series and (chain mail) jewellery so far.
Open enclosures: a woodchopping performance invokes bodies that chop wood, bodies that break things up, bodies that make links and alliances, both desired and unwanted. It speaks of exercises in repetition and asks: Who is really doing the work and what are its consequences? Sonic traces of the reading performance are woven into the shared Critical Studies soundscape, composed by Alec Mateo.
“Woodchopping has been compared to ballet,
it – is – so – intense,
its repetition, its repetition, that’s just drilled into you,
time and time again,
sweat, pain, anguish.
There is grace, but that’s not all; It’s brute training.
And it has to be accuracy and being precise, just so effortless and poetic.”
– Glen Gillam, world champion woodchopper 2018
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Body Languages 1: Woodchopping is a session of collective woodchopping. We enter into the realms of gendered and conflicting desires, extractive zones and competition. When we take pleasure in this violent taming, what languages do our bodies speak? What do we (re)produce? And, when we softly tiptoe between admiration and revulsion, criticality and affirmation, what are the consequences? Together, we work (things) out, we make a dance, destroy and denaturalise identification up to exhaustion, we think through shaky hands, we are shaping to take shape. Or, in the words of personal trainer, bodybuilder, stunt woman and artist Heather Cassils, “You have to break things down, to build things up.”
The workshop ends with snacks and a screening of the video work I was told I chop wood like a ballet dancer by the artist Freja Bäckman. Big thanks to Stadshout for the wood.
I facilitate and organise, research and write, perform and chop wood. I am currently a post-graduate at the Critical Studies department of Sandberg Institute and work with the queer feminist art space District * School without Center in Berlin, and as part of the Fuchsbau festival collective.