Venus

Modern day Venus, has had an out of body experience, she sees herself for the first time from above as a marble statue, limbless and inert. Is this a phenomenon sweeping the nation or a private identity crisis?

“The body is a bag, the body is boundless, the body is a cosmic mass with orbiting moons of lipids. It drags its belly across the floor and leaves traces of cells, cookies, dust, crumbs, plastic packaging and tiny crescent shaped nail clippings. Her body is soup, but her wings will soon beat for the first time.”
Gery Georgieva, Venus 2024

We consider the fallacy of the body as an idealised image, committed to stone. The experience of being a body is also to be monstrous, to be messy, to be in motion, to be imperfect, to be changeable, to metamorphose, grow, wilt, burn, thrive. We go into a deep dive of sensations and shapes in the body, of organs and territories, how they relate to the natural world, touching upon orchids and butterflies (metamorphosis and mimicry) and spiders (the weaver and creatrix of the universe) - all powerful symbols traditionally related to women and their bodies. The text starts in the first person narrative as Venus questions whether her soul and body are one as she sees herself from above, but becomes a hallucinatory stream of imagery and thoughts ending with the image of a limbless larva emerging as a butterfly, stretching out and feeling it’s wings beat for the first time. Venus becomes free of her own body as she finally soars in what might be interpreted as her stage death…