Bats were once considered to be strange, featherless Birds condemned to the night, surely longing surely longing for the light of day like other Birds. Not unlike autistic people expected to exist in ways that are not natural for us and assumed to be unhappy with our tragic lot in life. Bat's aren't Birds though - and just like autistic people they're have their own ways of doing things.
Ah, Poor Bird - take your flight Up above the sorrow of this dark night. Ah, Poor Bird - as you fly Can you see the dawn of tomorrow's sky?
Pteropus Diagnosis is about the misidentification of beings who are different. It's about re-diagnosing my autism through understandings that are not entirely human. What appears outwardly as poorly developed social skills and strange, eccentric behaviours manifests inwardly as a rich world of memories and relationships with Bats. These memories create protective escapes from social situations that I will never be able to navigate successfully, but am forced to participate in. They protect my mind from very real risk of social violence and damage.
The rhythmic, rhyming round of the Poor Bird folk song that opens and closes Pteropus Diagnosis is coded with secret meanings for me as an autistic friend to Bats. Like a calming mantra, it soothes and transcends its own words, becoming a sound-spell that triggers nonhuman sensory-social supports. The song is a constant reminder that what you see is not always all there is.
Pteropus Diagnosis begins with a stand-offish and aloof person leans against a wall at a social gathering. She is the only layer of herself that other people will see, yet it is the most restricted expression of herself. Her mannerisms could be mistaken as unfriendly, disinterested...or anxious and uncomfortable. She holds herself contained, still, yet fidgets impulsively with her hair. She hesitantly makes eye contact - it is brief, self-conscious and wary, almost defensive - before letting her eyes divert to some unknown, distant thing hanging above her. She seems to look at something no one else can see, connecting with the invisible instead of other people.
And yet, she is connecting with her sense of self through social relationships that don't usually count. She is imagining and remembering her time spent with Bats and the strength that gives her to be in deeply unfamiliar, confusing human social spaces. Romanticised ideas of connections to nature and animals cast aside, this work is a raw expression of what it means to connect with an animal, to consider that animal a person, to embrace the self as animal - and to understand the systemic dehumanisation and denial of personhood violently imposed on non-humans and neurologically different/disabled humans.
This video performance work is about layers of identity and connection. You could watch the piece several times and focus on a different layer each time to get an increasingly complex story. The uncomfortable, stand-offish weirdo hiding in the corners of social events slowly fades into near invisibility as we are invited into her social-sensory world of Bats and the free expression self-regulating autistic behaviours she has been taught to be ashamed of.
In so many ways, these behaviours reflect her connection to Country and her Bat mudjingaal (totem) - the parallel positioning of arm and branch, the synchronised movement of hand and wing, the thick shelter of leafy canopies projected onto hair that hides and protects.
These many layers of identity unfold under the ever-present branding of the autism diagnostic criteria - forever looming, defining, and reducing complex individuals because their ways of knowing, doing and being aren't considered 'normal' or even real. Yet her 'Pteropus Diagnosis' - her Bat defined and supported autism - is unrestricted, empowering, and full of colour, sound, and movement compared to grey, rigid person surviving uncomfortably behind a white medical diagnosis.
As an Aboriginal person, my way of seeing non-humans as family, teachers, and community is often looked down on as a primitive, 'tribal' worldview. As an autistic person, my unusual movements and behaviours need to be hidden because they are generally considered to be weird, embarrassing, and disturbing. Both of these discriminatory assumptions reduce the rich sensory-social, cultural world I live in - where every connection to every being counts and is deeply valued.
FUTURE PLANS FOR THIS WORK: Not being able to express my natural behaviours and connections is restrictive, I am constantly tangled up in how I need to behave and how I am expected to behave. And my Bat mudjingaal gets entangled in everything from fruit tree netting and barbed wire fences designed to keep 'the natives' (of all species, including Indigenous humans) out from essential survival resources and Country that is rightfully our/their Indigenous inheritance.
I intend to exhibit this work projected on, through, and alongside both standard and wildlife-friendly tree netting. Audiences can touch and play with the netting to feel the abrasive texture and restrictive capabilities of a colonial tool that entangles Bats and stops them from expressing their natural behaviour. My intention is to create intersections of empathy where people can begin to connect with complex, multilayered, multi-textured human and non-human stories and sensations of unjust restriction, exclusion, and reduction. Stay tuned!
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