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

Rarely screened all together in a single screening, the seven parts of Is This What You Were Born For? (1981-1989) by Abigail Child, pioneering New York experimental feminist and queer filmmaker and poet, unfold as a polyphonic, cross-hatched 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 speakers, workers and lovers, but always under pressure, always in jeopardy. Thisjeopardy (a word Child often uses to describe his work) stems not from a single source, but from the incessant interplay between social conventions, technological devices and cultural fictions so deeply entrenched that they present themselves as natural.

Drawing on an editing practice that extends William Burroughs’ cut-up methods, Child composes his films from fragments - found images, staged performances, home movies, industrial scenes - juxtaposed and displaced in both sound and image. The cuts emerge like unexpected encounters: images and sounds collide, often chaotically, dissonantly. These disjunctions reject the fluid continuity of conventional cinema, replacing it with a network of contradictions, crossings and overlaps. Viewers are torn between attention and disorientation, obliged to chart their own course. Child’s montage also insists on the visibility of the construction: it shows the seams and refuses the too-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 to do” has not already been written for us.