Odete

A SHORT HISTORY OF NECROMANTIC GENDER TRANSGRESSIONS

Using the figure of the baroque Castrati as the starting point, the performance speculates on the embodied histories of flamboyance and excess, tracing possible lineages of gender transgression as technologies of reviving the dead. If flamboyance is a gendered leaking beyond poetic constraints of legality and socialisation, then could we tie it to a possible history of necromancy and eunuchism? Using her body as the tool to unearth hidden histories and spirits, the performer uses text and singing to weave a “lament” that calls to the present this connection between the liminality of gender and the liminality of necromantic practices. Not so much a séance as a history lesson, this performance weaves through association, allowing glimpses of possible parallel tellings of our past.

CREDITS

Text and performance: Odete

Photo: Pinelopi Gerasimou

Odete works between performance, text, visual arts and music. Her work is obsessed with historiographical writing, using erotics and paranoia as two somatic ways of relating to the archival materials. She writes through her body, speculating biographies of historical characters through epidermic pleasures: fashion, personality, presence, fragrance, grace, sensibility. She claims to be a bastard daughter of Lucifer, descending from the medieval practice of satanic pacts to alter one’s gendered body. Lately she has been researching and working around building connection points between “effeminate” histories, from the baroque Castrati to the 19th century dandies.

https://odete.pt