body politics
Piano, text projection [18′]
Commissioned by Tomoko Mukaiyama for the production We Are The House.
Premiere in Kyoto, Japan, 21 March 2026.
The text for this work was paraphrased from parts of Anne Phillips’ 2013 book Our Bodies, Whose Property?, a fascinating and enlightening exploration of the problems that arise when the body is treated as a commodity.
Projected text:
What is lost, what is gained, when we name the body as “mine”?
Some say we belong to all, like rivers or the air.
Others say the body belongs to no one.
Hair, Blood, womb, egg, and sex, kidneys and livers, defended as property, they say “let me choose to sell.”
But markets turn frailty into hierarchy; choices are made in the shadow of hunger, not from open ground.
Treat the body as a self not as territory to hold.
Let bodies be seen not traded.
What is lost, what is gained, when we name the body as “mine”?
Property rhetoric turns selves into assets and the voice is lost.