Nomad Plan｜Dancing with Germs: Women’s Body Healing Plan

Damoyu Village Residency Plan

1. Who are we?

We are a psychotic combination full of passion for eating and cooking, a same-sex couple who have no job and are parasitic to each other, and two daily creators who have no plan for production and reproduction. One of them is clinging to the institutional elite in the name of studying for a Ph.D., and the other is resisting the logic of being strong in the name of being ill.

Niba started a doctoral project at the University of Leeds in the UK in October 2021. The research theme is monsters in contemporary literature and art, and he is eager to find new ecological alliances and different environmental narratives through "monsters". Nisha was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in Guangzhou Hospital in March 2022. At that time, she had just quit her job as a dance teacher at an international school and fantasized about making a career as an independent choreographer and artist. An unexpected overlap caused the two to have a hasty reunion, impromptu reorganization, and begin an earth-shaking life experiment - temporarily living in Shenzhen, a city where consumerism and neoliberalism are an alliance, and where the dream of getting rich is through fanatical production. Let's call it the "Ni X Sha" combination. .

As a group, the two's first "official" performance will be at the 3rd "Hangzhou Binjiang International Dance Week X Unit" in 2022. Due to the epidemic, the event was held online and offline at the same time. We performed "Move Hands and Feet" through Weibo while we were recuperating at home. This work focuses on the home environment and daily objects, using the simplest physical intervention to stir up seemingly lifeless life partners.

"Moving Hands and Feet" set the tone for our work: a de-anthropocentric multi-body narrative and healing experiment - but every word in it is fraught with questions! All kinds of "decentralization" are questionable, and decentralization involves a simplistic treatment of people. "Multiple Bodies" attempts to incorporate the unpredictable embodied experience and the vibrant non-human world into creation, but it always falls into the cliché of individualism and over-anthropomorphism. "Healing" is about seeking self-care and mutual care outside of mainstream medical treatment, but this is undoubtedly a field full of contention: if you are not careful, you may succumb to the closedness of self-preservation, or be limited to some kind of health. Essential understanding.

All these problems cannot be avoided and cannot be completely solved. Therefore, there is an X between the mud and the sand. Territory is a territory where deterritorialization occurs continuously, a territory where we encounter more bodies through the other.

Each encounter is an interactive “infection” that moves us further away from purity. We use the residential college space to gather young scholars from various colleges to perform site-specific performances; we dance blatantly in offices, libraries and public tea bars; we organize book clubs with the theme of mushrooms. Using the Internet, we launched an online dance video exchange meeting called "Dance Chat" and randomly selected themes (such as feminism, ecological environment, human-computer interaction, and disabled groups) to join online dance and body exploration enthusiasts. Nonsense. We believe that creation is a kind of healing, and dance is a non-consumptive, "sustainable" challenge to the boundaries of existence. They allow new relationships and new alliances to be built unpredictably like mycelium, allowing the body to break free. An organ of organization that allows thoughts to escape the governing logic.

Therefore, we are not one or two, but a group, a group of people, mushrooms, germs, plants, animals, inorganic substances, electronic products, and technological creations that are always in motion. What we want is not to drift without roots, nor to have an identity, but to create in the mud and sand, so that creation can become a collective action of heterogeneous symbiosis, in which "we" are just a small link.

2. Where do we want to go?

We want to go to Da Moyu Village, a Yi village in Xishan District, Kunming City, Yunnan Province. It is also a place where new villagers who have fled the city carry out rural construction and alternative life experiments. It is also a hot spot for China’s queer ecology.

The first time I heard about Da Moyu Village was at a reading meeting of "A Thousand Plateaus". An anthropologist friend was doing field work in Damoyu Village and was deeply affected by the vitality there - an intensity of life that cannot be tamed by mainstream theories and academic discourse. We were full of fantasies about this configuration of the new "Moyu Faction" villagers and the old Yi villagers living in Da Moyu Village. We immediately followed "Rainbow Baby" and chatted with Alex from the "Don't Be Willful Be a Dodo" podcast and joined her "Women Sei-katsu-sha Alliance". However, online interaction alone cannot satisfy (or dispel) our fantasies. As the friend said: "You must go to the village to see it in person to feel the vitality." As non-workers, we want to learn from the new villagers, how can we survive outside the mainstream economic system and hegemonic discourse?

The attraction of Yi villages was also planted early when we read the Book of Mushrooms with our friends. Luo Anqing's "Matsutake at the End of the World" and Michael Hathaway's "How Mushrooms Make a Living" both talk about the matsutake economy of the Yi people in Yunnan, and the dance of Yi pickers, mushrooms, insects and forests. We want to experience the imprint and reality of the matsutake economy in Damoyu Village, a traditional Yi village. We want to explore how mushrooms and other animals and plants in the local ecology shape each other with the culture and local knowledge of the Yi people. We want to know how the old villagers interact with each other. How do new villagers understand/misunderstand each other, accept/reject each other, and reshape/isolate each other while getting along day and night.

These motives are by no means pure, and in practice they are bound to be full of prejudice and division. We are very aware of the tremendous privileges carried by our own experiences and multiple identities—whether intellectual, class, regional, national, or historical. I remember when chatting with a new villager in Da Moyu Village in Shenzhen, she told us bluntly - "I hate scholars the most." Although we do not accept such a label, we are not surprised by such an attitude. We do not intend to study the Great Moyu Village, but instead of naively assuming that we have a sincere heart for knowledge, we should keep the advice of postcolonial anthropology and cultural studies firmly in mind in our little notebook: study the "other" (human, non-human) people, the environment) inevitably fall into situations of theft, exploitation, appropriation, and self-gratification. If we are in it, it will definitely affect the local ecology and residents. The foreign monster cannot control the direction of the show. It can only rely on local people (both new and old) to slowly enter the complex local political network (including humans and non-humans) and seek mutual benefit on the basis of mutual consent. Symbiosis.

3. What are our specific nomadic plans?

Topic: Female body healing guided by fungi

Fungi are mushrooms. I heard that Yunnanese people think that anything called “mushrooms” is artificial, and that “fungi” is what Yunnanese people think is connected to nature. In our imagination, the word "fungus" reflects the huge microscopic network of mushrooms underground, which is the vital link of life that connects plants, animals, microorganisms, people and inorganic objects in the place. Yunnan is the region with the richest wild fungi in China, where people of different ethnic groups have had a long and diverse co-evolution with fungi. We believe that mushrooms are the best guide for us to enter and understand Da Moyu Village.

Fungi are relational beings. We started our physical relationship in Yunnan. After I got sick, I always wanted to go to Yunnan. I wanted to breathe fresh air, eat clean food, and have simple interpersonal relationships. We feel like everything in the city is toxic, causing physical and mental damage. We also realize that this idea is too naive and represents the typical rural sentiment of some urban residents. We have no roots in the countryside and have been living in big cities (including urban villages) that are developing crazily at the expense of the countryside. We want to break through our own dualistic fantasies and see the deep connection between urban ecology and rural ecology. Fungi are everywhere, but in cities, their existence is reduced to an isolated product label.

The (re)production method of fungi breaks all labels and boundaries. We wanted to talk to people who were “not working normally”. Ever since I fell ill and realized that I would never be able to find a "normal" job again, I started to let myself go. We find that the space where people can work is being squeezed smaller and smaller, and older people, women, disabilities, illnesses, sexual orientation, mental fragility, etc. are all excluded from the "recruitment criteria." If you want to squeeze in, you have to draw a clear line with yourself and exploit yourself first, such as claiming that although you are older, you will never have children and will not delay work to take care of the family. Not having a job does not mean that you don't want to do things. "A job suitable for me has not been invented yet" is not a joke, but a proactive way of imagining a way of life. We want to explore possibilities beyond the mainstream survival rules, and some people are already practicing it in Da Moyu Village.

Luo Anqing said that picking up fungi is a kind of "dance". We want to go dancing. Dancing always makes people happy. I heard that the old Yi villagers like to dance very much. Anything can be a reason to dance, and they can dance whenever they want. Maybe having a dance partner can make it easier for us who get tongue-tied when talking. During the period of recuperation, we have also been doing some small creative practices, and our focus has gradually been focused on the body and disease. We believe that new places and new collections of life will definitely bring new materials and inspiration.

Mushrooms have been an important player in traditional recipes and medicine in China (and many cultures around the world). We found that people’s narratives about diseases in life are very limited, especially about cancer patients, including daily conversations and social media. They are basically tragic and inspirational, and most of the time they are avoided. Now I know that this avoidance may be well-intentioned, but it can make the patient feel lost and feel that his friends do not care about him. As a patient, I want to communicate with others about the disease and am curious about how other people and cultures view the disease. I especially want to pay attention to female body diseases. I found that my female friends all have some physical discomfort, but they rarely talk about it with others. Perhaps it is the insecurity brought about by the able-bodied atmosphere of this society that makes the topic of women's bodies and diseases especially taboo. Dancing with "germs", with special emphasis on the fact that this "germ" is not that "king", what we care about is not the mainstream male privileged class, but the extremely diverse group of women outside the binary gender (or in Deleuze's words , a minority group that “becomes women”), the shameful sexual diversity of the fungus world has endless inspiration for our care.

In the past few years, "bacteria" has become an increasingly frightening word, bound together with words such as "disease", "virus", "infection" and "isolation", and has become the main battlefield for various types of control. . We want to go beyond trauma to build a different narrative of illness. I want to challenge the mechanized manipulation of the body by mainstream medicine. During the long period of hospitalization and medical treatment, I felt a lot of negative impacts, and even direct harm, brought to me by the medical system and medical knowledge, and I was by no means an exception. This led me to explore many alternative medical treatments, such as diet therapy, traditional Chinese medicine, mind-body medicine, etc. I know that healing is one of the themes of life for many new villagers in Da Moyu Village, and I thought that fungi might be able to connect us, and perhaps lead us to older indigenous medical wisdom.

Itinerary and budget

We plan to go to Damoyu Village in June and stay there for 20-30 days. We will mainly stay in the B&Bs of local new villagers, which can provide kitchens. Since we became ill, we have been cooking by ourselves and trying more local recipes. We hope to continue this lifestyle in Da Moyu Village. The "fungus picking" season in Yunnan is from June to October, and we hope to enter Damoyu Village at the beginning of the rainy season.

The main expenses are round-trip air tickets and inter-city transportation between Shenzhen and Kunming. The food and accommodation expenses in Damoyu Village are estimated to be 5,000 and 5,000 yuan respectively, totaling 10,000 yuan.

We have never been to Da Moyu Village and have no experience of living in the countryside. This time we mainly want to give it a try to see if we can adapt to rural life and if there is a possibility of long-term survival here. Therefore, we don’t want to be like a tour group and arrange our daily schedule in advance, which seems to repeat the precise and efficient urban life. Fungal growth is the opposite of planning—mycelium is always sprouting everywhere underground, intertwining with, breaking down, and reorganizing unexpected things in the environment. Rural life, which seems imprecise and inefficient, is just part of our imaginary encounters. We fantasize about going on the road with the openness of mycelium, expecting surprises or frights, or unexpected encounters.

4. How do we want to interact with the local area?

We wanted to chat, but when we couldn't talk, we danced. I want to know what kind of dance the locals dance, why they dance, and I want to dance with everyone. Although I have many years of teaching experience, teaching modern, ballet and folk dance to both young and old, as well as doing art projects and workshops, I don’t want to “teach dance” anymore. I think people can dance by nature, and not only dance with people, but also dance with other things. Not only people can dance, but everything can dance. It’s just that for various reasons people gave up on dancing bodies. I heard that the local Yi villagers are very fond of dancing. They dance at family gatherings, during festivals, and when they have nothing to do. I can’t wait to join in.

We hope to integrate the new villagers into the daily activities of the local community. As loyal listeners of "Don't Be Willful", we want to experience the local nature and art education (various courses learned in Moyu Village), want to learn the practical methods and traditions of Liri's sustainable life, and want to try to use the principle of joy to develop the edge of autonomy. oriented life.

There are not only people in the "local area", but also a more diverse and non-human collective life. We wanted to observe flora and fauna from a naturalist's perspective, and as long-time birdwatchers, we wanted to listen and record every bird song. We want to pick and eat mushrooms with the local residents, trace the mycelium veins in the land, and use our sense of touch, smell and taste to enter the sensory world of the human and non-human residents of Da Moyu Village.

Perhaps such interactions are unproductive and seem to lack feedback. But result-oriented and goal-oriented interactions are exactly what we want to avoid. We believe that "responsible" nomadism does not mean adhering to a set of objective moral standards or establishing a moral high ground to restrain oneself, but lies in mutual contact. release each other's mobility, and constantly learn to respond to the survival desire and material energy of each life.

5. How do we plan to document the entire trip?

(1) Nomadic Notes: Writing is our daily life, and we will update an experience every week to share with the online community.

(2) Online and voice interaction: We will not only interact with readers on matters, but also hold an online voice event based on our nomadic theme. If given the opportunity, we hope to interact with other platforms (such as Alex's "Don't Be Willful").

(3) Art creation: For us, art practice runs through daily life, and food, clothing, housing and transportation are all inspiration and materials. We will mainly record the creative process through images.

Regardless of whether this project can be funded, we look forward to interested partners coming to chat with us! Seeing the fungus, Yunhu is not happy!