Photo by Flannery Langton ’22
Sal Cosmedy ’20 used common, gendered language in their performance art. The Nov. 12 and 14 performance art installations covered campus.
BY SABRYNA COPPOLA ’22
On the mornings of Tuesday, Nov. 12 and Thursday, Nov. 14, students stopped in awe between classes to admire some unusual events. Scattered around campus, students in the course “Body and Space” were engaged in two and a half hour-long performances. Seemingly unaware of the students gathered around them, they remained fixated in their art.
Walking from Dwight Hall to the atrium of Clapp, I saw many students in the midst of performances. They used many different media and props, including clay, paper, video and fabric, all to create scenes that stood out against the normal backdrop of academic buildings.
The performances were extremely personal, attached to strong emotions and messages. Students ignoring the onlookers made viewing the performances feel intrusive and deeply intimate.
The students involved meet twice a week for their seminar, “Body and Space,” taught by Professor Rie Hachiyanagi.
“Students learn how to utilize the body as the conduit of visual expression; they merge what they truly care about and what the body expresses,” Hachiyanagi said. “They also learn various connotations of chosen locations for their public art pieces.”
“[Performance art] forces you to integrate art and life,” she said. “Self-discovery that takes place in finding the parts of yourself that you did not even know, and in learning to use the body in a way you did not know how [to] before, empowers you as an artist and also as a person.”
Sal Cosmedy ’20 presented their piece on Tuesday.
“I hung up one of my rompers in the library entryway and placed signs around the entryway with quotes on it from Mount Holyoke’s website, articles written about Mount Holyoke and things that have been said to me about the school,” they said. “All of the language is explicitly gendered in one way or another. For the performance, I took the signs down off of the wall, stood behind the romper and held them up, crumpled them and then stuffed them into the romper. When it was over I used thread to sew one sign to myself and one sign to the romper, and then I rehung the signs on the walls.”
“I wanted to make public my experiences around gendered language and how it impacts me as a nonbinary person,” Cosmedy said. “I haven’t identified with womanhood for so long, and when I’m met with gendered language I often feel like I’m shoving it down and pretending it doesn’t hurt. This is especially true with stuff like ‘you go, girl’ and ‘uncommon women’ because it’s obviously meant to be empowering, and that makes it really hard to object to it. But in the end that stuff leads to the more explicit transphobic stuff, like ‘this is an all women’s college and I just don’t think you belong here.’ I wanted to connect those things, and make people see the feelings associated with the barrage of gendered language.”
Using the campus as a stage to present performance art in this way, especially during class time, offers a surprisingly surreal experience for viewers.