mirrored fatality is one of the groups performing at Queer Mvmnt Fest this year! Join them at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Downtown for their unique performance, ECOCIDE 3URTH.
mirrored fatality is an underground interdependent Kapampangan and South Asian xenobinary experimental and healing noise queer punk farmer duo sharing their rituals + altars. mirrored fatality creates their “cocoon webs” combining performance art, music, spoken word, film, photography, painting, drawing, upcycled garments, anti-imperialist education, and healing justice practice spaces to mobilize a warrior community responding to transnational calls-to-action for mutual aid, land sovereignty, and prison abolition.
What inspirations, launching points, or ideas are you working with for your piece for Queer Mvmnt Fest?
This performance summons itself from the Trans, Queer, DIY/DIT underground international QTBIPOC scene and codes itself from performance art, post-human, post-cyber, solar punk, mythological lore, futurism, avant-garde, and post-apocalyptic visions. During our performance at 143rd Dimension a Queer and Trans Punk Festival based in Oakland + San Francisco last summer 2022, our friend and peer Gaia WXYZ called us “apocalyptic spasms from anticolonial mutants.” Although our current spirits are adorned in human flesh + bones, we activate our true forms through armor + warrior ware and immersive performance reflecting the hybridity of utilitarian_cyborg, primordial_endangered species, and decaying earth_landscapes. Our world-building combines technological trash, cyberpunk, upcycled wares, inspiration from the international underground trans +queer punk/rave scene, and natural harvested materials from gardens and farms we steward. In this piece, Planet Earth turns into ECOCIDE 3URTH contaminated by climate catastrophe, pollution, intensive farming, land occupation, industrialization, and illegal logging and mining. We embody the hybridity of animals+cyborgs+transhumans: the laman haiwaan and labuad meklooq (kampangan_urdu for: flesh beast and earth creature) – the multispecies inhabitants of 2022 & 3033 living on ECOCIDE 3URTH: the corpses of natural ecosystems of planet earth murdered by apathetic humans and articial intelligence seeking vengeance. The malware Marga’ha ZamZam implants sentient Laman Haiwaans and Labuad Meklooqs, the multispecies hybrids of animals, cyborgs, and transhumans to reckon with ECOCIDE 3URTH’s retribution. In pits of lava, nuclear shrapnel, and untouched seabeds contaminated by technological trash they symbiotically conjoin in the wreckage of deserted laboratories, holy ruins, & subaltern fires to evolve. Our inspirations combine dystopian futurism with ancient mythology rooted from our South Asian + Kapampangan ancestors + future descendants. This piece allows us to morph into the multispecies creatures we hope to mobilize and bridge our future descendants who will live in harmony and reciprocal relationships with other living beings and the lands they cohabitate in when capitalism and climate catastrophe are obliterated.
What are some challenges, revelations, or unexpected aspects that you’ve had to overcome when choreographing this piece?
As transient full-time artists, farmers, and QTBIPOC punk community members it is extremely sacred when we aren’t working to meet our basic needs and can spend quality time with one another and be completely present and immersed in the Earth or expand our craft as mirrored fatality. We entered into an artist residency in Prattsville, New York in order to expand upon our choreography for this performance, but we had to redirect our energy towards creating an intentionally safe space for our curated show, RUINS which featured QTBIPOC artists: Smiling Beth, sunk heaven, and mater tenebrarum based in New York in Upstate New York at the Prattsville Art Center. RUINS was receiving backlash from the Christian, white supremacist, and right-wing religious groups in the Catskills because surrounding towns assumed we were “satanists” and that our “rage needed to be prayed away.” The town police got involved and it was rumored that 50 people were going to show up. Our number one priority was QTBIPOC joy and safety so we had to organize the show to another secret location & relocate housing for all of our friends in less than 24 hours. Due to the protest, we had to forgo a week of creation that could have gone into choreographing this piece. After the residency, we began working full-time at Star Route Farm in Charlottville, New York to grow & harvest food for mutual aid groups in New York City and Hudson Valley, such as Red Canary Song and Eart Brooklyn Mutual Aid. As farmers, we work 8 hours shifts where we perform immense physical labor and when we end our shifts we have to work on mirrored fatality admin, write grants for our chosen family at Earthlodge Center for Transformation, and provide deep care for our chosen and blood family who are chronically ill and navigating life-threatening diseases which took away even more time for us to expand this piece in the ways we dreamed. However, we are excited to share what we have made despite the obstacles & responsibilities that we both navigate through and are thankful for the opportunity to commune with other Trans/Queer artists for the festival to remember why we work so hard to perform as mirrored fatality in the first place.
What role will sound play in your piece?
We perform our songs: VALE, INVALIDATION, REINCARNAGE, BIOME(TRICS), PRIMALDIAL MAGMA, and ZYGMUTROPHOOZE from our EPs “COCOOON WEBS” released with Aklasan Records and “ECOCIDE 3URTH” released with Cherub Dream Records. Each song has choreography, wearable warrior ware, interactive ECOCIDE 3URTH sculptures, hyper-reality 3D-animation, and immersive visuals from our touring as full-time artists and farmers and utilizes guitar, bass, analog electronic music hardware, and our “Noize_Armor” utilizing synths, drum machines, & guitar pedals.
What would you like the audience to know about your work in this festival?
ECOCIDE 3URTH is a live biohacking and transmutation installation performance where mirrored fatality’s techno-bodies activate as a multispecies of animals, cyborgs, and transhumans in their immersive biome ECOCIDE 3URTH. This performance mobilizes Glitch TransFeminist lore as calls-to-action against transphobia, settler colonialism, climate catastrophe, and surveillance capitalism. mirrored fatality experiments with decolonial regeneration as their voice and movement triggers a live Kapampangan and Urdu experimental noise score, 3D animation, and interactive mixed reality video art. We believe in a future where all multispecies are sustained through the current crises towards a reverence for our multiverse. Through our work as farmers and artists, we aim to inspire transitions from the current anthropocene and ecoscene so we may be in the right relation with our Earth, the multiverse, and one another. We know our current reality in 2023 will shift as the lines between digital/virtual/reality blurs. Self-driving cars, Robocops, Biome(tric) Identification, and AI are now becoming part of our normal realities. We manifest a nonlinear battle cry between now in 2023 to 3033 and beyond for symbiosis between all living beings: cyborgs, humans, animals, and multispecies. We believe in the collective power of world building to summon a Trans Queer Ecoscene Futurity towards sustainable relationships to the Earth amidst the current wars against transphobia, racism, pollution, post-industrialization, and late surveillance capitalism. We center a commitment to creating a multiverse where creatures are no longer policed, caged, or killed by the war of incarceration and police violence. We believe in a world where pleasure and joy with Queer Trans Black Indigenous People of Color kin is centered through our laughter, affinity, love, and resistance with one another. In the future vision we imagine, the lines between human, creature, and machine no longer exist. There is no ableism, gender, race, or class. All life is living on planet Earth with sacred reciprocity where everyone is able to live in their optimum creative transmission and experiences embodied joy, energizing kinships, and lives in their autonomous eco portals where they feel happy, safe, and free. Planet Earth has regenerated and climate disaster has become a myth of the past. There is reciprocal care for all and no one is suffering under war or capitalism. All living beings on the planet live connected to one another and in symbiotic exchange.
What else is important to share about your work as an artist?
mirrored fatality remembers wholeness from dismembered flesh and mutates as cross pollinating perennial terratoids. mirrored fatality intertwines glitch rage webs with corroded resonance and regenerates forsaken spores across their current biome: ECOCIDE 3URTH. mirrored fatality is an underground interdependent Kapampangan and South Asian xenotr@nsbinary experimental and healing noise queer punk farmer duo sharing their rituals + altars. mirrored fatality creates their “cocoon webs” combining performance art, music, spoken word, film, photography, painting, drawing, upcycled garments, anti-imperialist education, and healing justice practice spaces to mobilize a warrior community responding to transnational calls-to-action for mutual aid, land sovereignty, and prison abolition. mirrored fatality internationally performs their sonic metamorphosis container, COCOON WEBS: a ferocious affirmation of chaos to harness ancestral power, primal spirit, collective fury, and interconnectedness to our multiverse in a world numbing us with toxic forces. VALE, BIOME(TRICS), BLOOM, UTOPIA, INVALIDATION, REINCARNAGE, ZYGMUTROPHOOZE, PRIMALDIAL MAGMA, and EARTHBODY(S) are restorative anthems to sustain us through the revolution to ground ancestrally, move through feelings of invalidation, cathartically release remnants imprinted by systemic and intergenerational trauma, and imagine visions towards collective liberation and land justice. mirrored fatality’s intentions for their art is for QTBIPOC to embody their rage and holistic healing to disrupt the isolation from existing in a white supremacist capitalist apocalyptic world towards new utopias.
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mirrored fatality is performing at more locations around the US! Check out their website and socials for more info!
June 16, 2023: Queer Movement Fest | San Diego, California
June 20, 2023: UCLA Punk Archive | Los Angeles, California
June 24, 2023: The Smell | Los Angeles, California
June 25, 2023: Coaxial | Los Angeles, California
July 7, 2023: Trans Pecos | Queens, New York
July 8, 2023: Dirt Palace | Boston, Massachusetts
instagram.com/mirroredfatality
https://www.nowness.asia/story/earthbodys-biometrics-mirrored-fatality
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBY8IFP0Q_4
Join mirrored fatality and all of the other amazing artists at Queer Mvmnt Fest next week! There will be performances, workshops, film screenings, and more! Make sure to RSVP for all events using the link below.