Performance - she/man ritual - by Yelena Myshko

This video is a presentation of my project SHE/MAN at school. Starring myself (Yelena Myshko), Jeffrey Singh and Marieke de Kan.
www.yelenamyshko.nl

I study fashion design and in the last assignment I had to invent a ritual for the clothes I made. The reason is that our forecast teacher thinks the world is changing from a material society into a sense society. Which means that things are no longer of value and experiences of the senses are more important. People want the aura of things back, a deeper meaning to their live, live healthy and contious etc.
My collection was inspired by gender bending woman who become men, like Thomas Beatie http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCMsKjUeLNU ) and I did a lot of research on that subject which led me to Alan Watts (whom I discovered through this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlXZTTdhgss ) talking about the west indian theory of nature.
This movie is a collage of clips which illustrate the male/female issues and struggle between the sekses.
The ritual I did and this video collage are based on the idea that Braman, the ultimate self, is pretending to be us for a long period of time. In the beginning of creation everything is beautiful, then it gets a little out of order and evil progresses so in the end the world ends and Braman knows who it is.
With this video I was trying to illustrate the search for gender identity of human beings. I will upload the ritual I performed along with this video as soon as possible.

All content of this video collage was stolen from youtube and myspace. I chose this because I was inspired by Hito Steyerl and her theory of modern archiving. Today archives are not collections of original pieces but interpretations of interpretations... She discovered this by trying to find the first jugoslavian newsreal which was released after the 2nd world war. Copywright doesn't mean anything these days because you can steel everything from the internet and if you change it, the copywright has no power.

The ritual itself is filmed from the side, so you don't see everything from the best point of view. In the beginning I am a shaman, my models come in at some point dressed in a burka. The one on your left sits down behind a cash register, the one on your right gets on her knees in front of the tv and they start to pray to these things. After a short while I tranform into an entity that represents power and control, I wear a long shiny gown and a mask with three faces (Stalin, Hitler and George Bush). I am holding guns which I lay down on the cash register and the tv in front of the models. Then I encourage them to shoot at each other. When they are tired of shooting they take of the burka's and the transformation begins. They throw down the control which was forced upon them while I transform into a terrorist. The girl cuts out her womb to become a man, while the man embraces the womb and gets pregnant. My rolemodels were:
- a girl from myspace who was on her way to have a sexchange, she still had breasts but looked like a guy.
- Thomas Beatie who was born as a woman but changed his gender into a man as an adult, he kept the womb and was able to get pregnant.
So the whole thing was actually based on two woman even though one of them appears as a man. The model is a real man who is wearing a rubber cast to appear pregnant.

Category:

Entertainment

Tags:

• alan
• watts
• theory
• of
• nature
• male
• female
• issues
• gender
• dentity
• human
• kind
• braman
• atma