Prestwich Place
In this once-off performance, seated on a rotating surface, undergoing a visual, transformation, the artist sits as Peter the Haircutter, blindfolded, ritually cuts her hair with a combination of cutting tools.
In Phylum and Phoenix, Raynham metamorphoses her body into a sculptural assemblage made up of materials drawn from the basic elements: air, earth, fire, plant, animal, mineral. Raynham’s live transformation is backed by cinematic snippets, shot at three Cape Town locations. In the Strand Street fragments, we see lines of unemployed men, Raynham among them, her hair extensions woven into the ubiquitous South African fabric of fencing and barbed wire. In the dream-like Hout Bay sections, filmed at night, Raynham is cocooned in the dunes. In the surreal Happy Valley clips, she stands among shacks and telephone poles, her hair extensions rising vertically to connect into the electrical wiring. Phylum and Phoenix invokes the mythical phoenix – symbol of death, transformation and regeneration – and the biological phylum to explore questions of transformation.
Performed by: Julia Raynham & Peter Assad
