Padded Screen becomes a stage for performing the text Is 1 hr 1 hr? A script between two mating intersexed flatworms written by Tiziana La Melia. Initially written in 2014 in response to Kang’s exhibition Deferring Diffractions at 8-11 Gallery, the original exhibition text is here translated into a video.

Since 2014 I have been looking at flatworms, in particular the species Turbellaria. Flatworms are intersexed invertebrates. Their mating ritual has been termed “penis fencing” by conventional science. I was watching videos of this rite at the same time that I was reading about quantum entanglement, the idea that all matter is intra-connected. Additionally, I was taking ballet classes for the first time; a strict program of body conditioning. I was watching the worms’ mating fight as a dance of entanglement, a conversation and negotiation. Slipping binaries, in between.

Padded Screen uses La Melia’s script as the score for a dance — a choreography within a flat room (underwater? above the clouds?) that intra acts with its containments and becomes with them, shifting over the course of the video. It blinks, it blushes, it develops and shatters and grows again. Container, contained, containment made blurry. Sensitive matter.

Script: Tiziana La Melia
Video production and design: Kate Sansom and Laurie Kang
Sound design: Kieran Adams and Laurie Kang
Dialogue editor: Marcel Ramagnano
Voices (in order of appearance: Danielle St-Amour (narrator), Laurie Kang (first flatworm), Tiziana La Melia (second flatworm)
Special thanks to Ali Qadeer