sarma

This text was commissioned by the German Dance Congress 2006, which took place in Stuttgart from 22 to 26 February 2006, and published in their programme book.

Since they met five years ago Kattrin Deufert and Thomas Plischke have been sharing work and life. They came to exchange the dominant social fiction of the heterosexual couple for the fiction of the artistic twin, which links the impossible desire to coincide with the other to an illegal moment of incest, a betrayal of genealogy. The underlying question: “How to knit your own private political body?” How to move beyond common yet normative ideas of anatomy, gender and sexuality? How to create a place for what escapes this frame, for what is absent?

One answer is knitting. That is to connect holes with holes, to incorporate loss, trauma and remote memories in a tissue of myths and shared stories, to create a place for mourning. That is also continuously formulating and reformulating one’s work in order to stay alert, resist prescribed patterns and put identity at risk. And that is to linger in a paradoxical space seemingly devoid of difference and soak beauty with melancholy. With Fernando Pessoa: “Living means knitting according to the intentions of others.”