between the clouds and the sea

Ewan S Pires

Introduction

My approach to this work has been happening in parallel with what I would describe as my personal journey to a topic that will always have a big impact on my life: gender. Positionality comes into action and I start this work with the certainty that this will be an immensely subjective work intertwined with my personal life. I am a Portuguese non-binary actor-musician with a background in classical music, graphic design, marketing and data science. My life is full of contradictions and I love exploring paths between the scientific and the artistic world. My design training gave me design thinking (empathize, define, ideate, prototype, test and implement) as a way to interact with the world, data science gave me CRISP-DM (business understanding, data understanding, data preparation, modelling, evaluation and deployment), marketing gave me too many frameworks to describe here but even the concept of a unique selling point has been used by tutors and teachers many times this year when reflecting about us as actor-musicians.

One of the biggest pull and push forces in my life is trying to find a balance between scientific and accepted things that are real and true and exploring things in the arts because they feel real as anything else, in this interdisciplinary exploration of new realities.

What I wanted to achieve with this research was not only to deepen my knowledge on this subject but to understand if I can transform this knowledge and research into something that can have an impact on people.

How can I be more aware and deconstruct my own biases and how can I help others do the same? I wanted to present a complicated theme, that keeps getting more and more negative backlash in the media, something that is usually presented in an aggressive manner in the most gentle, balanced way to allow space for the viewer to think and evaluate their own opinions about this subject, and also to allow space for the viewer to think about their own gender as this is something that can be new for some.

The research question

My path to the research question was not a straightforward one. After doing a lot of reading and watching and exploration about the subject I realised I needed something tangible as part of my project and this could give it direction. After the work, I realise that I was left with many other questions that could be explored in the future.

I wanted to explore gender in a gentle way, and have started having conversations about gender with my friends at this point, I didn’t know how I could focus my thoughts on one single question that would allow me to explore different sides of gender but making the subject less broad and a question that I could actually answer by the end of it.

In my mind I had several possible paths I could choose to pursue, I thought about the connection between internal feelings and external interactions, something exploring the importance of coming out and what that means, how identity is formed, in this case, gender identity but there was an interest in exploring all sorts of identities and how they matter to the individual and society, barriers and struggles that are imposed because of gender identities and the idea of exploring physical space and how I could still use my questions around the subject to get to a deeper level of what I was looking for. I was also interested from the beginning in exploring AI's and what could be the future of co-writing from a perspective of something that doesn’t have the gender limitations humans have in their day-to-day interactions.
The understanding of gender will come from the big data techniques, scraping, analysing and training and will always be a rational perspective to it.

My question was what is an ungendered space? and I realise now that even the wording I used contains a prefix which is usually connoted with negativity. One of my discoveries during all this exploration was regarding space, both physical and mental space, how nuances within the language are used and how some of these things are so ingrained in us that deconstructing them implies a great level of effort.

Vade Mecum

Vade Mecum felt like a solid beginning of my gender exploration. By this point, I was familiar with gender theories like:

• Gender Essentialism - whatever it is a gender it’s better explained by biology

• Social Constructivism - gender identities, expectations and rules are grounded in social norms presented by Judith Butler with their theory on Performativity

• Subconscious sex - how your brain expects your body to be presented by Julia Serano with her Intrinsic Inclination model

I also explored the meaning of Performative Utterances (J.L. Austin) as a language that brings to existence the very thing that it seems to describe. Like “I promise to” or “I do (at a wedding)”.

Kae Tempest On Connection allowed me to explore the concept that it is a matter of lens to focus on similarities and ways to connect to others and using creativity as a means of counteracting the numbness of the modern world. I knew I wanted to do something that could open doors, not shut them, I wanted to provoke the spectator to think that when we look for similarities the results can be surprising and yet we tend to focus on the differences.

Visiting LADA’s study rooms

Visiting the LADA study Rooms was an incredible experience. From the inspiration taken from all these different materials to the openness to uncountable possibilities, it was very important to see, hear and read different ways of telling stories, different takes on gender

Micah Rajunov and Scott Duane’s Nonbinary: Memoirs of gender and identity defend that “GENDER is a slippery illusion. Like the flat outline of a cube, you can perceive its shape as either concave or convex, extruding or withdrawn. If you’re especially adept, you can see both simultaneously, or perhaps, even for a moment, neither at all. Upon deeper inspection, you might deduce the truth at the heart of it all: there is no one “correct” form. Yet all of them are real.”

I recorded some of my thoughts into a notebook and took some pictures of some of the beautiful and incredible images that I was being presented with.

Rrose is a Rrose – Gender Performance in Photography offered a series of photographic artworks that question gender identity through performance or technical manipulation of the image. This book felt particularly important, gender was played with, creating beautiful images that confronted every notion of gender binary.

Sex, Drag, and Male Roles: Investigating Gender as Performance This book blends first-person memoir and commentary from Diane Torr with critical reflections and contextualization from leading performance critic Stephen Bottoms, including the long cultural history of female-to-male cross-dressing.

I’m Every Woman by Narcissister (2009) this drag performance focused on sexual body and hyper feminisation. To get dressed she kept pulling things out of the crotch area focusing in this manner on how hypersexualised bodies of trans women often are and the way they’re seen by society

Kiss My Genders celebrates the work of more than 20 international artists whose practices explore and engage with gender fluidity, as well as non-binary, trans and intersex identities.

None of Us is Yet a Robot by Emma Frankland was another book that deeply marked me. It was beautifully curated and felt like an exploration.

Video ideas

This was my first time working with video as a medium. I realised that my perspective shifted completely from the moment I knew I wanted my final product to be a video. I found myself finding and recording beautiful unintentional things that were just happening following the urge of moments and getting my phone camera ready at all times and I found it fun.

Interactions with an AI (Jasper)

One of the other ideas I had for my work was to use AIs and neural networks to work as a partner for my writing. Although I didn’t use it for the writing of the piece I did spend some time asking questions and creating content that I could use as inspiration (see attachments).

With time, integrating AIs into work can be a powerful tool for bringing creativity and technology together and this is a route that I will want to explore at some point in the future. In this case, it became apparent how good the writing was, how coherent the answers were and how there is so much potential in applying this to creating new things.

GPT-3 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer and the three stands for the third generation). It’s trained to generate human text that reads like something a human would write through the use of billions of machine-learning parameters. It essentially intakes text and content across the internet and uses it to discover predictive writing patterns used in common language.

From idea to practice

Practice as research in the arts by Robin Nelson has been a concept introduced at some point during this course and pursued into this work with moments of critical reflection existing throughout the preparation of the piece. This resonates in retrospect with the way that I ended up structuring my piece but because I didn’t exactly follow the steps I should have from the beginning I will say I didn’t base my research on a single methodology but used a mix and match of methodologies that influenced me before and let time and people guide me.

"Alas, I did not say what I should have. I submitted fog and chaos to a distillation." I discovered this quote by Czesław Miłosz when researching for Vade Mecum in a book by Kae Tempest and it opened a world of possibilities for me. Not having to have every part of the journey figured out before starting may sound very obvious, but for me, it has always been hard to choose one thing instead of the other and with this shutting possibilities down. This phrase helped me to unlock something in a very powerful way. Not only I realised I didn’t need to know every step of the way I realise I don’t even need to know the exact place where I was going. All I had at the beginning was knowledge about gender and the premise that I had to solve by answering the question I had submitted. I started writing about bodies.

The theme of bodies has been something I’ve been exploring since starting my Vade Mecum research, how they inform and change our perception of life, how they can be changed and political and charged with so much meaning than is usually not seen. Trans bodies and their validity, different bodies, anything that makes them other and how that impacts the world around them. Beautiful bodies that are able to take lives, for the sake of not fitting in. Visibility of what is other, being other, acceptance of all sorts of bodies, levels of ableism. I knew I wanted to have more text around this theme so it felt like a good starting point. From this text, I started paying attention to the visual cues of the world around me and it felt obvious when I was boiling eggs one day that this would be setting the point and the beginning. The analogy between the literal eggs and the beginning of life and pregnancy and all the things that surround this felt like a strong place to start. Exploring the concept of birth and heartbeat. Paul B Preciado says “one day we'll see assigning gender at birth as brutal and unjustified as assigning religion at birth” when asked the question will we ever stop assigning sex at birth? The first song in the background is a text from the Orthodox Liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom. It is a hymn concluding the consecration, the part of the Divine Liturgy and it translates to We sing to you, we praise you, we thank you, O Lord, and we pray to you, our God. With this, I wanted to bring religion to the argument for the sake of it, as a reminder of how different faiths can impact differently everyone’s belief system and how religion can have an enormous impact on birth, education and LGBTQ+ issues even if in the background just existing. What isn’t obvious was that when creating the song I explore the role of octaves below the region where I can sing with a pitch modulator to give it depth and as a way of imagining my voice in a lower frequency.

I wanted to have an analogy between the randomness of tides filming the body of a dead jellyfish with the randomness of a newborn being assigned male or female at birth. It’s ultimately a game of luck and at the same time a brutal ritual that is still part of everyone’s birth in western cultures (and most cultures around the world). The one thing that will influence the most the way you are looked and look at the world, all decided by nature as an act of randomness.

At this point I had concluded the interviews, I knew I wanted to use them but still didn’t know how. These conversations helped me to shape my ideas and for a very long time all I knew was that I wanted to start with an image of boiling eggs, and the sound of a heartbeat, I wanted to have Tebe Pojem, the orthodox song in the background and I wanted to talk about bodies. I kept exploring the world with my camera and realised that I wanted to add images that could help to set the pace, the message and the inner exploration for the audience. Went on numerous drives in Portugal with my phone recording and ended up mesmerised by this.

One of the things I realised from the use of video was the power of nature and how quickly and slowly it moves at the same time. I spend a lot of time looking at the sky and this was one of the things that made me really excited, and it still does. Seeing how quickly everything changes, and how fluid most of these images are. How we can very quickly go from a storm to seeing the sun and the power of accelerating these images in video and letting these changes unveil in front of the spectator without understanding where the exact point of change occurred felt so strong. There is a lot of nature and nature taking its time during the film. It was intended to set a pace, to allow time and to be an anchor of reality to what we know in case everything else felt alien.

One day I couldn’t sleep, it had been hard, and after being misgendered at some point my gender dysphoria was dragging me to a dark place and all I could think about was how my life would have been different had this one chromosome been different, but then how different? How would my relationship with gender be if I’d been born with a different sex? When I was a kid I wanted to be called João, which is a masculine name in Portuguese, (John in English) and until I was 10 everyone in my family thought this was funny and made sense so I lived without shame for a long time. Then something changed, I grew and negative feelings like shame and guilt started and didn’t stop for a very long time, maybe as a part of a somehow religious upbringing, maybe as part of a society that never allowed my dreams of not being who I was a possibility. I had this need to ask more and more questions to this other person that I imagined being born instead of me: João. I started by writing and after a couple of layers of sound decided to improvise more on top and see what textures I could get. This is a part of me that I protect deeply, it is still a very sensitive subject, I have just recently finally been officially diagnosed with gender dysphoria and between hormone replacement therapy, cryopreservation, potential surgeries and the constant coming out, I have a long path in front of me to be the person I’ve been wanting to be since I can remember. The boundaries came in the shape of layers, bits can be understood, but not the whole.

In these letters I raised so many different questions, I imagined this other person, assigned male at birth and wondered how different would my life have been if instead of me he was the one being born, even though I know that this is just me fantasising about a different life experience and how different would my struggles or victories be. I can almost see this other person, had the combination of chromosomes worked slightly differently or had we used different measures and ways to define bodies.

The improvised double bass comes as the only possible way of creating a bridge between thoughts and reality, I improvised as I thought about the letters and different scenarios the disquietude coming from the unknown at the same time that images of skies were shown, pulling us to what was real in this dream-like composition.

Constant coming out. Constantly. On a daily basis. Coming out. I didn’t think I was going to write about this. But the violence of coming out, constantly feeling like you’re hiding something that people can’t see but impacts life so much, so deeply can be a burden. I didn’t ever want to victimise myself or anyone during the piece, I wanted to do things on my terms but the fact that so often people are forced into this vulnerability just because they have to expose themselves in order to survive and these acts of bravery, pushed by the impossibility of not taking them to keep moving the world forwards. Arin talks at some point that this is something we need collectively to unlearn, that it is an opt-out situation and not opt-in and with this idea comes the hope that we can continue making the world a better place instead of passively consuming what is in front of us, even if this means leaving our comfort zones.

Comfort. That’s all everyone wants, to not be at war with their own bodies, identities, genders, dreams, beliefs, needs, and wants. It seems so simple and yet the most basic things can truly be the hardest to achieve. Places where identity and body can just exist without the need for external validation, private or public places. Places that don’t allow violence in any shape or form and open kindness.

The second song, Canção de Embalar by Zeca Afonso is a Portuguese lullaby that uses gendered words (as Portuguese does) in a gentle and soft way like “sleep my little boy”, or “sleep because the night is still a little girl, let her come as well to sleep”. This makes no sense in English but in Portuguese, there’s a big wordplay with the gender that the author probably doesn't assign meaning related to gender, but this song could also set the pace for the things that were to come.

This idea that Nuno shares that we seek aggression when moving towards masculinity and to softness when moving towards femininity is the way is something that I wasn’t expecting to find but it is so obvious. We were talking about this in the context of transition even, how hormones impact bodies moving in different directions.

In the first part of the interviews, people answer the question how do you identify? The second part was organised around how is your gender important to you? and I felt it was a big part of the conversation where most people had to stop and think for a second. This is a very broad question but I wanted to understand how it was important for their identity, ultimately would it be possible to boil down the importance of gender? The answers really took me by surprise, I was not expecting what I was given and it was so interesting to find that in a lot of cases the only reason gender was important was to define what people were not. Seeing the gender binary as a path and only noticing gender existing whenever behaviours fall out of this binary of thought. It felt important when Elias replied to me “I just am” as if everything we try so hard to maintain as important or have as inevitable “truths” can be challenged by how subjective gender is. It was also very important to understand how most people had stories to offer about being othered, how being different was the only thing that stuck out from their experience of gender. How we spend so long trying to fit a mould that is not right for anyone and how these experiences of otherness can often lead to shame and trauma. When Michael said “I had a friend trying to cut my hair at a sleepover” this took me by surprise but the aggression put into being othered makes me believe that this is something all humans have in common and if this is the case why do we focus so much on the differences and not enough on similarities?

Lyle brought up the idea of community and finding people who understand and empathise with you is important and this is a great reason to use gender as a way to find these people. The idea of community came up a couple of times during the interviews, the way that we seek identity clusters to find others “like us”. This idea is one that I have been trying to explore for a long time. Some years ago, when studying social networks and the impact of networks on people’s lives I came across the word homophily. “Similarity breeds connection. This principle—the homophily principle— structures network ties of every type, including marriage, friendship, work, advice, support, information transfer, exchange, comembership, and other types of relationship. The result is that people’s personal networks are homogeneous (...) Homophily limits people’s social worlds in a way that has powerful implications for the information they receive, the attitudes they form, and the interactions they experience. Homophily in race and ethnicity creates the strongest divides in our personal environments, with age, religion, education, occupation, and gender following in roughly that order.“ (McPherson et al., 2001).

If this principle is correct and we look for similarities to find a way of belonging then we need to be gentle with the way the community spaces are held. What does community mean other than a group of people that have something in common? How can we use community to connect and build, instead of something that can divide us? How can we hold spaces that are truly for everyone?

When trying to answer a question about creating ungendered spaces, so it felt important to explore how spaces can be unsafe. How can we move as a society to a place where spaces get safer? Is the lack of safety in some places affecting the ways we approach gender? These were some of the questions I wanted to go from here but to get there it felt important to explore this notion of unsafety and discomfort.

It was interesting listening to some perspectives from people that identified as cis man and realising that violence doesn’t just exist towards women or people that identify outside the binary, spaces can be violent for everyone. Gender can be violent for everyone, or as Burhan said, it can be “a bit boring”.

For a while I didn’t know how to end, I didn’t know how to allow space for introspection and time for thought and I knew I wanted to provoke the audience with questions that could be controversial but needed to challenge thoughts about a theme that people sometimes take for granted.

Looking at the question I began with - what is an ungendered space? - even though I haven’t answered the question with my work I managed to start conversations with it. The number of people that were generous with me giving their time and thoughts was priceless and since I started this project I’ve had numerous conversations with different people even when the part of the piece was done. I still get excited starting conversations about gender with people and it feels great that this work and research gave me an excuse to do it. I feel however that I’m closer now to an answer than I was before starting this. My knowledge about the theme grew and it gave me a new world of possibilities to work with.

One of the questions that was brought up by someone that watched the video is how to connect the idea of gender and languages. My own perception of gender is different from having a first language where every single thing is gendered. The whole idea of removing gender from an imagined space or word becomes trickier when you have a linguistic perception that a thing should be considered male or female just because in your brain, that’s how you always experienced these particular objects.

Would removing faces help with trying to demystify biases? I wonder what would happen if voices came first and the images of the people only appeared in the end. If nothing else this would probably make us more aware of biases we have towards language and how people present even if it is just their voice.

Many questions were built on the back of this research like:

How is gender important for identity?

How is gender attributed to spaces?

How can we look at and argue complicated and philosophical themes with empathy?

How can we use gender as a way to connect to others?

How much does the perception of gender change because of language?

How can we move forward as a society accepting that the concept of gender is inherently subjective?

Although I did not embark on this project thinking about future possibilities I realise now some of the potentials of this work. There’s so much to say about gender, about so many themes that bring pain and fracture society into polar opposites of the world. I’d love to explore this theme deeper with people from opposite sides of the argument for the sake of consistency and fairness. I want to challenge what the knowledge of the subject is and bring new perspectives to the table, I want to see and understand how people truly experience and see gender from their perspective and help others reflect on this.

My journey through gender has completely changed the person I accept myself to be. There’s a level of flexibility with my gender that has been unravelled by personal research and this practice I chose to embark on. In the end, summarising my practice and my work, I want to be able to keep asking questions and starting conversations that can lead to acceptance and comfort. This is probably going to be the lens that will pour into my work one way or another and I feel like this piece of the most varied inter-disciplinary fields was able to resonate my voice the way I wanted to. I’m still uncertain about many things, and I still feel full of contradictions but I want to use this to keep pushing forwards.

The scope and length of this research didn’t allow me to deep dive into all the things I wanted to but I feel like this is a soft beginning and not a harsh end.

Ultimately, all I could wish for is that this work can bring some comfort to whoever might need it, by exposing how violent and universal being othered can be and how offering kindness is a personal daily choice we can make. Any gender is valid and you are important.

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I’ve recorded the explorations with Jasper (AI) asking questions related to gender, connection and identity: