While bearing a pre-eminent concern for the gesture, the performative in relation to gender, as well as other theatre and performance related elements, Stefanie Seibold´s work manifests itself in various formats. She is specifically interested in shifts of meaning through a re-contextualisation of images and other signifiers that point to queer readings. In 2005 a site-specific series of installations entitled City of Women was initiated at a gallery in Liège (Belgium), and were continued this autumn at the lesbian club Monokel. The title refers to the concept of a separatist utopia, while the installations are comprised in such a manner as to form a specific narrative from elements of Stefanie Seibold´s work at a specific moment and place. It was also intended to react to the club aspect of this venue with an opening night DJ/VJ event in collaboration with Marthe van Dessel from bolwerK interrational (Antwerp).
The City of Women installation in Monokel included a performance video entitled I Am Not Half the Man I Used to Be (Utrecht, 2005). In this work Brussels-based actress Tara Casey performs a fragmented version of a piece of text trying to make sense of the concept of the gaze. The text discusses that female spectators eventually have to perform a lesbian gaze, which has been largely omitted by theory. Another part of the installation was the Suffragette City / City of Women series (2004), which consists of eight video-performances cut from a long improvised performance session. The scenes take place in a room in front of a wall. Two performers appear as hybrid creatures, and are different versions of the same thing. They wear red wigs, body stockings, black nylons, and garters. Erotic references and props are used to casually create a space for carnevalesque attempts concering representional, love, sex, and similar such relations.
A visual archive A Reader, produced in 2006, was distributed in various contexts and venues throughout 2006, the first of which was the Utrecht Feminist Legacies and Potentials in Contemporary Art Practice symposium held in March. The three posters – A Reader – an independent visual work by Stefanie Seibold, also functions as a context for her work in general, and as a queer and feminist fanzine in particular. The idea is to illustrate a facet of desire through a combination of images and other materials that exists only in an in-between, that has to constantly re-install itself in the fissures and gaps that any hegemonial discourse – like heterosexuality itself – leaves. The posters are also meant to represent a realm of politics that deals with the development of strategies to de-naturalise normative concepts of identity, the body, sex and gender. The posters were distributed with specified tickets purchased at the 2006 City of Women Festival.
Stefanie Seibold
