Deadline for applications is Tuesday 18 February to attend our free art-writing course, in collaboration with Bergen Kunsthall and Office for Contemporary Art Norway.
When I spoke to Eisa Jocson in late August, she was not in her hometown of Manila, but a greener place. From my computer screen, I could see the cantaloupe light of the outdoors; a dog yowled in the distance. As an artist whose practice studies how bodies of colour move within and adapt to different socioeconomic contexts, this choice to de-situate herself seemed an act of resistance. Pole dancing is a movement language, she said, as is macho dancing, a highly coded display of erotic masculinity seen in Filipino gay bars.
Ballet is another movement language, as well as the facade of eternal happiness performed in Disneyland parks. All of these forms β which have been learned and harnessed by Jocson in her practice β originated from specific socioeconomic contexts: strip clubs, royal courts and corporate boardrooms. Jocson made her first movement work in At that point in time, she was teaching pole dancing as a fitness regime, having recently completed a degree in visual arts at the University of the Philippines.
She had also trained for seven years in classical ballet. The confluence of all these experiences metastasized in Stainless Borders: Deconstructing Architectures of Control , a performance in which she pole dances around flagpoles, gates, signposts and traffic signs.
As a brown Asian woman β a figure often stereotyped in popular culture as either a sex worker or domestic helper β Jocson deconstructed not just public designs, but also the psychological spaces in which hierarchies of race, class and power reign.
