Bea Rubio-Gabriel
“a slight tilt forward”
I stand in a threshold
my life unfolds in the margins
my labour lives across multiple sites
The foyer of the gallery is a threshold where we meet with a smile, as confident footsteps pull you into this world away from the one outside, before you falter and return. Then, a slight tilt forward: Can I just go in?
The question doesn’t matter, you had already entered, until the thought bloomed in your mind that perhaps this was a threshold that needed permission to be crossed. This control is not quite mine to exercise, yes of course, please. There are two entrances, start with wherever feels best for you. There is no right or wrong way to experience this place.
What was once the human right to safety has been eroded into a privilege,
Where trust has been compromised into control and honesty has become radical, you and I are enfolded into the same immaterial relations of production —
your attention is counted while my labour is monitored
The structures that house our work are alienating spaces,
The deeper I go into my labour the further I lose myself
You’ve gotta get in that zone.
It’s killing time in the name of safety
A quiet mangling of hours into something manageable,
a slow descent of the body into fatigue.
Fatigue, too, is a threshold, between what is asked of the body and what the body refuses
If meaning emerges from that transitionary space,
what can be found between our responsibilities and our refusals?
I have become my own master, I spend my time doing many things at once
I quietly read a comfortable enough distance away, allowing you the false security to pretend you are not being surveilled, as you allow me the reclamation of my own labour
and in attempting to uphold my own efficiency, I deteriorate into the desire to do nothing
this is a performance of all that is available to me
because even if to displace things only slightly,
we unveil the capacity for the greater system to be dismantled.
Bea Rubio-Gabriel is an artist, curator, and writer born in The Philippines now living in Naarm (Melbourne). Performance becomes enacted through quiet gestures to re-imagine translucency and the ‘&/’ as new spaces of dwelling. Moving rhizomatically, their curatorial and writing practice seeks to transform the hierarchies of care™ into the act of ‘tending to’. Their research currently focuses on the moral economy of labour, migrational inheritances, the politics of translation and resonance as a new relationality.
