Lou Lou Sainsbury: Earth is a Deadname

About

Identifying as a time traveller, Sainsbury works across film and performance, writing and textiles. Her work unwrites and rewrites the natural history of living beings, inviting the viewer to delve into alternate mythologies informed by queer and ecological activisms.

Sainsbury’s performances and films result from long-term research developed through collective study and collaborative processes. Her recent work maps a constellation of holes, vampires, aliens, miracles, mysticism, impossible births, interspecies encounters and life in constant transformation, bodies that seep out and words that crack open.

For her first institutional solo exhibition at Gasworks, Sainsbury presents a newly-commissioned performance and video installation that seeks to reimagine transgender experience beyond the limiting language of medicalisation, rewriting its histories into an interplanetary poetics of trans* sensuality, relation and desire.

Based on a series of 'trans-for-trans' writing workshops and reading groups, Earth is a Deadname is a trans-erotic space opera, a heartfelt love song for more-than-human life after the end of this world. In Sainsbury’s words, “We return to the earth, where ‘Earth’ is a deadname, where the night is also a sun, and earth feeds on the placenta of its own rebirth”.