BETHESDA

Performance, November 2021

Performing ‘Bethesda’ at Revision Performing Arts Festival 2021 in Flax Art Studios.

In Dante’s Divine Comedy, the sodomites were doomed to run across burning sands for all eternity. This Christian canon was passed down to the artist by their father, their relationship complicated by queerness, but with whom they would also train and run long-distance, until the artist developed chronic pain and became bedbound. At the pool of Bethesda, Jesus said to the sick: “Do you want to be made healed? Take up thy mat and walk’. Here, the artist runs across industrial grade sandpaper, shedding blood and infusing their bodily material with this confrontational statement of self-liberation from illness.

Photos by Chloe Austin.