Intimate Reparations: An embodied critical powerplay

Children of Bondage remastered

The work is a ritual performance that explores decolonisation of the body/land. It examines the intimate entanglement of race, power, colonial sex and violence through ritualised bondage and domination on and with the racialised body. In the performance, Rehane Abrahams and Wynand Herholdt offer their bodies as a site for ancestral/historic excavation. The piece uses BDSM, kink and Shibari as modes of speaking the unspeakable – the ‘pornography of empire’ and the colonial grotesque. In the process the performers try to imagine emergent fugitive spaces of new queer ecologies and multi-species relational intimacies.

In rendering tangible the tethering of black female sexuality to the history of chattel slavery and colonial violence to contemporary capitalism, a bondage rope connects the past to the present, but it also reveals the past as the present (and future).(Ariane Cruz, 2016) What happens when the racialised, gendered power roles are reversed? When a white masc body is bound and tethered in submission to a black femme body? What permissions are asked, what historical pain viscerally experienced, what taboo pleasures felt? What can the performers access by offering their bodies as a site for this history to play out? What histories of the land are excavated through the performing bodies? And what futures can be called in through binding the body to tree, to rock, to grass; through obedience to nature’s ties of interconnection; through submission to the Earth? Can we dream of invoking the libidinal law of the Land itself? Can the performers cultivate a resonant bodily tenderness that reaches out to include all humanness, all species, all ecologies of being.