Online audio performance
Terms: rhythm, weak disease, repetition, care virus, coincidance, affective labour, contingency, cyberfeminism, from the future at the present, speculative synthesis, left melancholy
Nina, K. and Connie is an online audio performance developed from the ideas in the WH!PH! Side Affects text. The performance focuses on the three characters in the text. The protagonist, who we have called Connie, is lying with fever and experiencing delusions. On the other side of the wall, Nina and K. are heard speaking within their collective situation.
We have adapted Connie from the central character in Marge Piercy’s 1976 feminist utopian novel Woman on the Edge of Time. In the book, set between the 1970s and 2137, the futuristic opportunities for collectivity are shown as both positive and inclusive. Borrowing from the progressive movements of the time, Piercy shows a way of living within a collective which overcomes the problems Connie experiences in her own time.
In a 2016 text by Marge Piercy, she looks back at this novel from a distance of 40 years and notes that utopias are no longer created. She says “when our political energy goes into defending rights, and projects we won and created are now under attack, there is far less energy for imagining fully drawn future societies we might wish to live in.”
Our performance draws on the hopefulness of feminist utopian texts of the 1970s and the collective-positive cyberfeminist movement of the 1990s, and pauses to imagine feminist utopian ideas of collectivity.
