Focus #3 - Is This What You Were Born For?

✴ 8pm - Is This What You Were Born For? (Abigail Child, 1981-1989)

Rarely screened together in a single session, the seven parts of Is This What You Were Born For? (1981-1989) by Abigail Child, a pioneering New York filmmaker, experimental poet, feminist and queer artist, unfold as a polyphonic and fragmented investigation into the ways in which contemporary life is inscribed in the body, especially the female body: how posture, movement, and even desire are choreographed by the omnipresent influence of media and machines. The films place bodies in shifting landscapes—public and private, intimate and industrial—where they become, in turn, speakers, workers, and lovers, but always under pressure, always in peril. This peril (a word Child often uses in describing her work) does not come from a single source, but from the incessant interplay between social conventions, technological devices, and cultural fictions that are so deeply ingrained that they appear natural.

Drawing on an editing practice that extends William Burroughs’ cut-up methods, Child composes her films from fragments—found images, staged performances, amateur films, industrial scenes—juxtaposed and displaced in both sound and image. The cuts emerge like unexpected encounters: images and sounds collide, often in a chaotic, dissonant manner. These disjunctions reject the fluid continuity of conventional cinema, replacing it with a network of contradictions, intersections, and overlaps. Viewers are torn between attention and disorientation, forced to chart their own paths. Child’s editing also emphasizes the visibility of the construction: it shows the seams and rejects the easy closure of meaning.

The result is a work that dances on the fault line between “the human will to persist” and the cultural machinery that seeks to choreograph it—a work that asks whether what we are “born for” has not already been written for us.

En plus d’être cinéaste, Abigail Child est poète, et nous avons voulu publier la traduction de ce poème de 1989 pour accompagner la projection de Is This What You Were Born For?. Lust fait écho au montage heurté du cinéma de Child, et à ce film en particulier. L’un comme l’autre recourent à une syntaxe très libre pour fragmenter langage et image, afin d’explorer et d’explorer la manière dont les gestes et les désirs du corps se trouvent pris dans un circuit dense de codes culturels, de médiations technologiques et d’idéologies dominantes nucléaires, capitalistes, impérialistes et hétéropatriarcales.