RITE OF TRANSITION 2025

“Rite of Transition: Body T” is an ode to queer parenthood and childhood, playing with the language that is transmitted and passes between the mouths of adults and children (and vice versa). A political fable dedicated to the processes of bodily, hormonal, social, and ecological transition, where invented creatures with seven wings and zero eyes, forests wounded by monsters, dances of eggs and cocoons, and mythologies for blossoming bodies that desire transformation intersect.

In these stories, what is to come is a scar of what happened long ago. We try to translate this scar into children’s language, create vegetable skins, sculpt stone mouths, and, whenever possible, play.

But how can we tell myths of transition without alienating ourselves from the marks of a whole set of species and voices that have been absent from the monocultural world? How can we talk about what has been changing and transitioning at an ever-faster pace? And what about new “soft robotics” or liquid nano-interfaces that have rapidly altered the landscape of science and ecology, and are not always accessible in new metaphors for understanding the world? For example, TestoGel, applied to R.’s arm every night? Or water pollution with estrogen, which has caused cases of early puberty?

A shared rite of transition, which attempts to be an intergenerational poem and inhabit an alchemical space between arts and sciences.

© Patrícia Black