Visitors were invited one by one into a staged bedroom with the performer ensconced in the bed, surrounded by array of objects intended to alleviate pain, boredom, or ennui (bottles of pharmaceutical pills, chocolate, sex toys, marijuana, etc.). Upon being invited to sit at the foot of the bed, the performer said, “I’m not feeling well. Will you take care of me?”. The ensuing performance was entirely visitor-led, with the performer following all instructions without intervention.

This has been performed twice. The second performance was in a bathroom space with the performer sitting clothed in the dry bath. Each one-on-one performance lasted for 15 minutes, for a total performance duration of 3 hours, 2015.

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I had a friend who used to insist that “self harm is self care”, and I really wanted to find out how to draw that line for me- where “care” is harmful, where harm is “caring”, in a harm reduction lens that resists easy or universal answers. This is, for me, an expansion of my experiences of date rape and nonconsenting medicalised contact- experiences which exacerbated the conditions of this piece, experiences which created the urgency of these concerns. I want to know how we can respond to those who need our care, when an expression of bodily need is in, many ways, a non-consensual expression. So I also want to know how to articulate my own need to better intervene in the cycle of harm, how to better hold a need for care that harm creates- a progression of need that itself can be harmful.