Sall Lam Toro OBSIDIAN DREAM LOVE LETTERS

A multimedia live performance installation piece that unfolds an everyday performative practice of black queer erotic consciousness through rituals, phantasmagoria, and archiving as embodied care practices within body and nature.

2 sculptures of obsidian raw stone companions act as the primary living subject of an autoerotic desire and contemplation throughout the performance. The sculptures are further combined in an installation with animated objects and poetic visuals on film regarding ghostly presences, rebirths of self, and caring bodily interviews conducted in the heart of Dakar, Senegal.

The performance reiterates these elements within movement scores interpreting the symbol of 8, or also called infinity sign, associated with divine power, death and rebirth. The performers draw this symbol in their movements repeatedly, backwards, attempting to trigger echoes of remembrance, active mourning and (re)birth within atemporal, multidimensional timelines.

The work schemes connections between altered forms of fugitivity, the shapeshifter body, and nature enacting spaces in which “separability becomes dissolved” (Da Silva, Denise) in non-linear time and imagination is called upon as a love gesture guiding us into remembrance.

Sall Lam Toro (they/them/hir)) (1990, PT) is an antidisciplinary multimedia performance artist andorganizer based in Copenhagen, Denmark, working with the mediums of performance, dance,sound, textual and visual art. Their work relates to producing and claiming the erotic as a way into decolonizing body(ies) while finding strategies to create more accessibility to multiple universes of the sensual. Their pieces strive to break or overcome the consequences of coloniality-based violence and oppression through rituals, economies of care and the senses and establishing intentional relationships with grief and death. They have been accepted into the MA Performing Arts: Critical approaches at the Malmo Theatre Academy at Lund University starting in 2023.

Their work has been experienced/shown at Kunsthal Nord, Click Festival, Åben Dans, ArtHubCopenhagen, Gammel Strand Kunstmuseum, and Danshallerne’s Kora program, and their writing pieces have been published as part of ABHIVYAKTI magazine and the Forum for Kunsthistorisk Debat Journal Periskop, 25th edition: “Sorted”. www.sallamtoro.com

Creation, co-choreography, artistic direction, script writing, performance Sall Lam Toro Script writing, performance, co-choreography, assistance Suzie the Cockroach Animation, original soundtrack composition and production, assistance Warren Jones

Videography, pov, narrative Keiria Hissabu

Light and visuals design Will Zawistowski

Costume design Serena Coelho

3D animation and promotion visuals Janice Prempeh