Text in Public – Zine Performances and Rants

By Emma Wolf-Haugh

Emma Wolf-Haughs Publikation Text in Public – Zine Performances and Rants verbindet Texte aus performativen Arbeiten, Performance-Skripte sowie collagierte und kollektiv entstandene Textformen miteinander.

In Wolf-Haughs interdisziplinärer Praxis der letzten zehn Jahre überlagern sich Installation, Performance und experimentelle Workshop-Formate. Oft dient dabei DIY-Publishing im Kollektiv oder Selbstverlag dazu, Emmas vielschichtige Aktivitäten mit Text zu bündeln und neu zu kombinieren.

Die Publikation durchquert kulturelle und historische Schauplätze, gelebte Gegenwart und imaginierte Zukünfte und nutzt Autofiktion und Anekdote als Teil einer Tradition queer-transfeministischer Arbeiter*innensprache und -ethik, die freizügig ist und gleichzeitig geschickt innerhalb von Limitationen operiert.

• Language: English
• Publisher: EECLECTIC
• Release date: Oct 31, 2022
• ISBN: 9783947295753

Emma Wolf-Haugh

Emma Wolf-Haugh is a visual artist, educator and writer-based Berlin and Dublin and working internationally. Emma’s work is shaped by economic necessity, engaging forms of recycling, thrift and ephemera that result in soft modularity, wild archiving, and performative intervention, posing questions about value, accumulation, and authorship. Their pedagogical and publishing work posits the imagination as a political tool with radical potential that can exist and erupt anywhere and at any time. Emma has developed a trilogy of works since 2014 dealing with queer and transfeminist economies and spatial politics. The Re-appropriation of Sensuality, Sex in Public, and Domestic Optimism have been exhibited through various iterations at: The Project Arts Centre Dublin, The Grazer Kunstverein Graz and De Appel Amsterdam, among other places. Emma is co-founder of ‘The Many Headed-Hydra’, aqueous-mythmaking-decolonising collective, since 2015 and founder of ‘The Reading Troupe’ – Disruptive Pedagogy, workshop and instant publishing series, since 2013. Emma is the editor of Having A KiKi – Queer Desire & Public Space, PVA, 2016.

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Emma Wolf-Haugh

Text in Public

Zine Performances and Rants

Edited by Achim Lengerer

Published by

SCRIPTINGS

and

EECLECTIC

Many of the texts in this publication were written for performance, some for live performance, some as scripts for video and others as performative writing that lives across the page towards imagination.

Index

Sex in Public

What the Fuck Are You Looking At? Translating Your Gaze

Poverty of Vision

Libidinous Memorial Flag for Peter Clemens

Inflamed Recreation Room

The Re-appropriation of Sensuality

Dyke Action – Sex in Public with Line Skywalker Karlström

Domestic Optimism Act One:

Modernism – A Lesbian Love Story

Domestic Optimism Act Two:

Radclyffe Hall – The Lazerbeam Theirstory ­Projects

Friction, Magic, and Queens

Reading Troupe #01:

Physical Education, Exercises in Embodying Discourse

Obsidian Butt Plug

Symbolic Monarch Tells Women of Ireland to Calm Down...Wait...Really?

Relational Otherness: A Manifesto

Sex in Public

A model citizen is supposed to represent – face forward, smiling.

Full optimisation and the national future.

Citizenship, reproductive family feeling, inheritance and blood.

The centrality of blood is the mechanism by which corrosive sexuality is immaculatised in a space of sentimental nationalism.

This privatised sexual culture is what was called the love plot of intimacy, a rite of blood as a psychic base for identification.

Enforcing boundaries between open spaces, commerce replacing state, making sex private by making bodies narrative, productive things – cushioned from chaos by the reinforcement of public and private divisions.

Fantasy becomes banalised by ordinariness; the most intimate crevice now vibrates in the law.

The explicit aim is to structure everyday life, currently phrased as the promotion of a white-dominated social mirage, carefully organised by hazy mass memories and faceless hierarchies.

Above the door is written: The Amnesia Archive.

Let’s say these whirl exploitations are central to the bureaucratic transactions of citizenship and let’s speak their names.

One, Two, Three

If viewed from miles above, this place would appear as a small boxlike structure, like thousands of others set down along the lines of rivers in the world. Though in this one the face of the girl starts moving up the wall, past a window framing the perfect hazy coastline with teeth of red factories and an incidental gas tank ­explosion which sends flowers of black smoke reeling up into the dusk. I can feel her lips against mine from across the room, ­tasting weed or cheap white wine on them as she ­disappears through a square hole in the ceiling. Watching as her legs and feet leave the rungs of the metal ladder, following her hips through that dark space, the soles of her ­sneakers floating effortlessly in the opening for a second, then shifting out of view. I follow her motions, pulling myself up two rungs at a time and, as my head clears the ceiling, I see her recede further back in the space, the horizontal red lines of her arms still luminous. Like her I have to crouch in order to move through the narrow space and finally reach her. Her hands slide from her pockets and over the front of my ­trousers, moving back and forth until we we’re both wet.

I lean in close and unsnap her jeans, button by button, using only my teeth.

One, Two, Three

To cultivate a collective ethos of futurity through the fractures of the contemporary, they gave up their ­monogamy.

Distinctions between self and other collapsed, while the relationship between visibility and this hegemonic cluster slid along its developmental slope, downwards, inwards, towards a middle point.

Practical homonormativity and well-cared-for ­economic brick walls rewrite the meanings of vulnerability and receptivity and the whole field of sexual and social relations becomes a privatised ethics of fiscal ties.

This sense of rightness could come and dance directly on top of you in a dense, relentless way.

If every sexual encounter involves bringing someone back to your house, the general sexual activity in a city becomes anxiety-filled, class-bound and choosy. Public rest rooms, peep shows, sex movies, bars with grope rooms and parks with enough greenery are necessary for a relaxed and friendly sexual atmosphere within a democratic metropolis.

Non-residential scenes of intimacy – warm, unstable, shifting, intimate lives involving rages, instabilities, ambivalences and failures. A range of ways of being sociable and sensual beyond civic coherence. It is through sex, touch, sound, sight, smell – as well as reverse biopolitical processes – that bodies bring worlds of non-economic erotic exchange into being.

A complex cluster of sexual practices, intimacy and care makes us think about the many ways in which ­vulnerability can be performed.

One, Two, Three

I unbuckled her belt and she pulled down her pants. I turned her gently around, slowly eased my fingers into her ass, and she pushed into me, taking my fingers all the way down. Her ass was lubricated with Vaseline, I wondered if it was from this morning or last night. That thought made me even hotter. Someone started licking my back and ­stroking my pussy from behind. This was also a great pleasure for me. I fucked her gently at first, then gradually as hard as I could. Sweat poured off us in sheets. From the depth of inebriating darkness of that underground cave, I fucked and got fucked, moments of surrender for all of us. ­Onlookers touched themselves in the shadows.

Rethinking the presumptions about penetration and vulnerability, the sexual and emotional intimacies of touching and being touched go on endlessly.

The liberation of doing it, in not admitting to our­selves and others that we were confronted with our own failed attempts to transcend fantasies, in asking what the limits of queer might be. Thinking that queer might not be the word to define all of our unrealised public cultures around different aspects of emotional life.

Forms and arrangements – as fictional, uneven, ­off-centre – destabilise the importance of a historical relation to a statistically imagined norm. At this point, the critical culture of the public sphere is produced in almost every aspect of the convex, bent, radiating shadows.

One, Two, Three

It was dark because somebody had taken the bulb away. I had a piss and, as my eyes became accustomed to the gloom, I saw a woman, a labouring type, big with cropped hair and, as far as I could see, wearing jeans and a dark short coat. Another woman entered and the woman next to the labourer moved away, not out of the place ­altogether, but back against the wall. The new woman had a piss and left the place and, before the woman against the wall could return to her place, I nipped in there sharpish and stood next to the labourer. I put my hand down and felt her pussy and she immediately started to touch mine. The youngish woman with fair hair, standing back against the wall, went into the vacant place. I unbuttoned the top of my jeans and loosened my belt to allow her free reign. The woman next to me began to feel my arse. At this point a fifth woman entered. Nobody moved. It was dark. Just a little light spilled into the place from the street, not enough to see immediately. The woman next to me moved back to allow the fifth woman to piss. But the fifth woman quickly unbuttoned her shirt and flashed her tits and the women next to me returned to my side, lifting up my coat and shoving her hand down the back of my trousers. The fifth woman kept puffing on a cigarette and, by the glowing end, watching.

One, Two, Three

People come here to find each other.

Activist claims to visibility quickly follow those material transformations where ‘the woman’ imagines sex in public; this involves smooth bondage tape that guarantees safer sex in a homophobic environment, seamless black silk tightly stretched emphasise the look and practice of decorating the soft, badly lit areas.

In feelings of embarrassment, frustration, and anger with imposed structures and affects of narrativity, you passed through the unique combination of decor, space, lighting and dance with a spiritual education.

The absence of clocks contributed to the dynamic. In the everyday world the clock signifies the unstoppable forward movement of logical time. When the clocks are nowhere to be seen, time starts to dissolve, ­providing an opportunity to forget our socialised selves – the ­person who has to get up at a certain time, go to work at a certain time, take lunch at a certain time, leave work at a certain time, and so on