CUD - Frances Libeau

CUD refers to the chewing-over-again of partly digested food eaten by ruminants (animals like cattle, sheep & goats). To ruminate is to think, or dwell on a thought repeatedly – as a creature throws up its meal only to chew it over again.

CUD is a sonic collage intent on reanimating (& ruminating on) a range of ferally scavenged archival media: advertisements for Aotearoa’s meat, milk & farming products; radio cooking shows; queer local cinema; the violent semantics of authoring sound effects; & the hauntological grief of a dance only heard, not seen. The work seeks to explore relations between reproductive/nonreproductive & human/animal bodies, their associated technologies & byproducts through repurposing archival media.

CUD seizes on what Mel Y. Chen refers to as ‘leakages’ between classifications of what is human & what is not, with an emphasis on the idea of “naturalness” & its other, the “unnatural” – a term frequently deployed in reference to queer sex & reproduction. CUD asks you to lean into the leakages, to reiterate & invert them – irrupting the smooth semiotic surface of naturalness’ normative containers.

The word ruminant is derived from the Latin rumen, meaning ‘throat’ – the site of both the voice, & the breath. The recorded singing voice featured at the end of CUD is that of the only Castrato singer ever recorded, Alessandro Moreschi, singing Tosti’s Ideale in 1902. The dancer you can hear panting & stomping is Douglas Wright, dancing Elegy, a piece made in 1993 for his friends who died of AIDS. Spliced together – with reverence –  across almost a century, they offer a surrogate lament regurgitated from a gender-bent throat.

CUD opens with an invitation to see, perhaps in line with Barthes’ dictum that to see well, you must close your eyes. I wonder then, if to hear well, one must close one’s ears, or perhaps lean into sounds of the errant, the monstrous, the distorted: the unideal.

Ideale  (Tosti, 1882; translated from the Italian)

I followed you like a rainbow of peace
 along the paths of heaven;
 I followed you like a friendly torch
 in the veil of darkness,
 and I sensed you in the light, in the air,
 in the perfume of flowers,
 and the solitary room was full
 of you and of your radiance.
 
 Absorbed by you, I dreamed a long time
 of the sound of your voice,
 and earth's every anxiety, every torment
 I forgot in that dream.
 Come back, dear ideal, for an instant
 to smile at me again,
 and in your face will shine for me
 a new dawn.