SEPARATE THE SPINE FROM THE BODY

Performance, 2025, approximately 35 minutes 

Shisanwu / Sheerly Touch-Ya Warehouse, Queens, NY

Separate the Spine from the Body is a performance about the private negotiations that happen inside the body, especially bodies shaped by chronic illness and gender fluidity. The performance uses soft sculpture worn over the body to create a monstrous form. Drawing from sci-fi horror and daily rituals, it confronts invisible discomfort and the urges it creates. These include the desire to dissociate, destroy, or transform the body and the tenderness required to endure oneself. Acts of self-care and self-harm collide, blurring into one another through ritualized gestures of containment, violence, and surrender. In this performance, dismantling is essential to bodily liberation, and that harm reduction takes unexpected, personal, and fantastical forms.