The Mouth is Still a Wild Door will have its in-person debut screening in San Francisco at the Roxie October 17, 1:30 PDT, event here.

“Unnaming Statement,” the writing that accompanies this film can be read here.

This work was supported by a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Art.

The Mouth is Still a Wild Door is a collaboration with artist Guta Galli. It is based on my poem “My mother was a secret house” (scroll to page 23) from Sun Cycle. Sun Cycle is a heteroglossic book of poetry constructed in multiple mediums, that has since been the basis for three collaborations with artists.

I was drawn to Guta Galli for her work The Minotaur and Us, a series of performance films. Guta picked the poem. Our piece both carries themes of her series, and refers to Lygia Clark’s performance Baba Antropofágica. We were going to originally re-perform our own version of it at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive accompanied by a live incantatory reading of “My mother was a secret house.” As covid-19 spread, we altered the performance, and eventually had to remake it as a video.

My poem is based on Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch, a book about the oppression and historical repression of reproductive labor. Some feel Federici essentializes the female body by linking it in her work so closely with physical reproduction. I agree. At the same time, the tale she tells in her book—that the “enclosure” of the European grazing lands is a moment that began capitalism we know it today. It invaluably explains capitalism’s link to gender, the creation of race, and colonization. I originally wrote the poem in deep mourning of the world I needed and wanted as I was surviving domestic violence alone with a newborn essentially without community or family. Caliban and the Witch gave me an imaginative reference point for deep connectivity and inextricable, consensual communication as a form of life.

We made The Mouth is Still a Wild Door during fascism, the last months of Trump’s presidency. As we were finishing it, the foundation of the US, slavery-based capitalism cracked wider than it has in recent memory. We participated in this uprising in anticipation of a new world.

Crossroads Film Festival, 2021

BAMPFA, October 25 2020

sourced from Sun Cycle poem "My mother was a secret house"

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