Hand to mouth to
Hand to mouth to
Hand to Mouth, as a project and as a company materialized from a personal state of disillusionment and frustration. The fictional sense of crisis I was operating from was a projection of my desire for a utopian functionally within a failed system. Not feeling integrated or coherent generated a necessity to decondition myself of its mechanisms in order to reinvent my understanding of being outside of it. Desire and longing render themselves almost as survival strategies for a condition of immense needs.
April 2020, NYC: Week five of self-quarantine under COVID-19, the world outside temporarily fits its behaviors to my dysfunctional projection of it. We are only going to get more lonely, more horny, and even more broke during this pandemic.
June 2020: While still in lockdown we are confronted by ongoing police brutality, racism, and injustice, their overt violence, and our complicity in their existence.
As a group of individuals faced with global uncertainty and forced into our respective personal spaces, we resort to dystopic optimism as we commit to the trouble of vulnerability in our attitudes and practices. Maintaining intimacy, not losing touch, and sharing of resources feels like the right values to focus our care on in preparation for whatever version of reality is awaiting us.
The props, set design, movement materials, and videos in Hand to Mouth — informed by architectural models, collage, and jigsaw puzzles — acknowledge the cutout and its negative shapes as positive architectural economies of consumption and refuse. In this jigsaw-puzzled world, the violent acts of dissecting bodies and environments, and the contrasting care of assembling in the collage process serve as the range for the first of the project’s workshops. Can we, as compartmentalized individuals in a fragmented ruined landscape, locate a newly formed incorporated body that has the ability to reverse the limited direction of consumption into a manifesting power of possibilities to interact with, within, and without.
August 3, 2020: Hand to Mouth is taking its provisional nonexistence into an even more virtual space. Until we can all touch the same prop and share physical space with a live audience, welcome to our temporary. For the time being this website will serve as our open studio; a platform to share publicly the vulnerability and intimacy of our process. Launching on the full moon of August 3 we are keeping with this cosmic period. For the next 9 moons we will workshop one notion each month and will update every 28 days via newsletters that distill the process’s outcomes: new experiments, actions, and propositions. To join our orbit and sign up for our lunar calendar click moon.