mothertongues is Meital Yaniv & Kim Ye.

Through collaboration, mothertongues creates a sphere of authorization to exercise communal frustrations, aspirations and fears using our bodies as objects of resistance. Like jazz musicians, we employ a call and response technique to augment one another’s intuitive decisions in the performing, filming, and editing process. Tears, laughter, joy, pain, vulnerability, and bravery co-mingle through mental and physical interpersonal explorations. As amatuer scientists, we run experiments of desire on ourselves and each other, observing and documenting the chemical reactions that occur between elements. In recording our findings as specifically and subjectively as possible, we create a fiction that speaks the truth.

PSA (Self-Brainwash Meditation #404), single-channel video by mothertongues, 2017. Duration: 18 minutes 44 seconds

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In PSA (Self-Brainwash Meditation #404), we engage with issues of struggle revolving around women’s bodies as a dominant and dominated site. Building off historical portrayals of rape as something done to women’s bodies, we postulate a contemporary mode of understanding of rape as something done with women’s bodies. Combining a public service announcement (PSA) and guided meditation into a single form, this video blurs the line between fantasy and reality to propose potential tactics that can be used to empower those who may find themselves on the receiving end of such aggression. Taking from the principles of aikido, where the practitioner defends themselves while protecting their attacker from injury, this work envisions how to weaponize the power of surrender. By exploring the difference between experiencing a traumatic event and an identity built upon victimhood, we suggest alternative ways of resistance in which one’s vulnerability becomes one’s greatest strength.