Queers, Crips, and Mermaids: Disruptive Bodies as Performative Objects

This chapter attempts to analyze and unfold interlinked layers of a research-performance, in two interconnected site-specific Acts. First Act (Collision) happened in St. Moritz 2020 and the second Act was performed a year later in Bern 2021 . By adopting the notion of “cosmopolitics” as a method, this Performance attempts to speculate inter-relativity of human and non-human bodies within the capitalist matrix of species hierarchy. Through comparative analysis of different psycho-cultural/political narratives, this text attempts to map out interconnected traumas of transspecies; wounds and scars that are older than our bodies, older than ourselves. This text uses diffractive reading of these two Acts through the histories of the figure of the mermaid and the witch, In order to queer the hegemonic interpretations of both figures. keywords: Diffractive methodology, public art, performance, Antiracism, posthumanism, Posthuman performativity, cosmopolitics, history of mermaid, Motion capturing, virtual reality, queer theory, witch, siren