passage (CIRCULATIONS #11)

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Background: The CIRCULATIONS series of performance installations employing salt as medium were initiated for regional cluster events of 'Fluid States: Performances of Unknowing', the Performance Studies international globally distributed 2015 program. 'Passage' extends this series with a new work for an exhibition by artists participating in the Bahamas cluster event 'Deep Anatomy', curated by Sam Trubridge, exploring competitive free-diving through art. Contribution: In contrast to the pursuit of frontiers of human achievement through free-diving vertical depths, 'passage' was a site-specific performance installation exploring horizontal paths of experience. Using PCV plastics, sea salt, sound, paper, granite rock, and daylight, the installation in an abandoned harbourside silo complex (now arts venue) created a dramaturgical pathway of experience through six tall silos into a central liminal space flooded with seasalt. Through two performances Douglas undertook a post-human oriented enactment of porous enmeshment, as sea salts from around planet earth enter his body, drawing forth a planetary oceanic liquid from within, correlating with the rise of high tide in an emplaced moment in the ellipsis of circadian time. 'Passage' contributes a post-humanist exemplar of performative practice engaging an immanent condition of human-ecological relations. Significance: The CIRCULATIONS series, exploring local specificities and global connectedness of cultural and ecological systems, was selected for showing in 2015 in Bahamas, Rarotonga, Tohoku, Melbourne and Manila, and is reviewed by Felipe Cervera in online journal GPS Global Performance Studies. 'Passage' and 'Deep Anatomy' were reviewed in New Zealand's premier online contemporary art review magazine Eye Contact by curator/writer Claire Ulenberg.