Single-channel video: 12 minutes. Commission for performingborders’ annual performance to camera commission. 2022
Amnion considers the connection between all beings and bodies - our reliance on each other and on our collective leakiness for survival.
Amnion thinks through water as a medium that literally connects all watery bodies – all living creatures to each other, as well as to hydrogeological and meteorological bodies, the significant water loss in menopausal bodies, our human affinity to whales – the only other species that undergoes the climacteric and lives a long post-reproductive life, and the enduring biological enigma that is the menopause.
Layered voices narrate text excerpts from philosopher Astrida Neimanis’ and writer Darcey Steinke’s ideas exploring the leakiness of borders between our bodies and our environment, and between human and cetacean, as well as the fallacies and fears that continue to surround bodies transitioning from a state of fertility to one of barrenness that affects more than half the world’s population.
Amnion, a 12-minute film, features a series of abstract images of my child’s skin and my own alongside each other, limbs entangled, moving in and through a milky medium, with shots crossing the borders of liquid and air, as well as outside and inside the body. Our skin and body contours read as landscapes of contrasting textures of youth and age. And alluding to the momentous occasion of my final eggs being shed, I expel egg-like objects from various orifices including the mouth and between folds of skin.
Watch Amnion here.
Conceived, narrated & performed by: Lynn Lu. Directed, filmed, edited by: Ana de Matos. Second performer: Satsuki Lu-Sharpe
Narrated text excerpts from:
Neimanis, Astrida. Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology. London: Bloomsbury, 2017.
Neimanis, Astrida. “Hydrofeminism: Or, On Becoming a Body of Water.” in Undutiful Daughters: Mobilizing Future Concepts, Bodies and Subjectivities in Feminist Thought and Practice, eds. Henriette Gunkel, Chrysanthi Nigianni and Fanny Söderbäck. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
Steinke, Darcey. Flash Count Diary: Menopause and the Vindication of Natural Life. New York: Sarah Crichton Books, 2019.