Connective Tissues

With "Connective Tissues", Rhoda Davids Abel experiments with arranging her performative and poetic work into a book. How does an ongoing stream of writing, dreaming, performing, and embodiment live on in a written text? How does it change the sense of authorship, the relation to the audience, the question of representation, and even reality created? How can meaning be fixed or translated, and who has the power of definition? In her poems, Rhoda Davids Abel lets the many live-worlds confluence, that she, her family, and her ancestors have inhabited converge across many continents, countries, cities, and cosmological realms. Words, symbols, sounds, feelings and bodies carry different meanings, status and power in different places. Sometimes they can be translated from one place to the other, (most) often not. Other means of relating to each other have to be invented - through art, solidarity and care. Interwoven into the dreamlike flow of Rhoda Davids Abel's poems is the existential question of how she and other people are seen and represented as human beings across the transnational and violent regimes of race, gender and class. Oscillating between self-representation, self-care and vulnerability, Rhoda Davids Abel seeks to find an artistic approach to navigate the cliffs of in-betweenness in a fragmented world. (Rohit Jain)

With an afterword by Sindi-Leigh McBride