Pteropus Diagnosis

Bats were once considered to be strange, featherless Birds condemned to the night, surely longing for the light of day like other Birds. Not unlike autistic people - expected to exist in ways that are not natural for us and assumed to be unhappy with our tragic lot in life. Bat's aren't Birds though - and just like autistic people they have their own ways of doing things.

Ah, Poor Bird - take your flight Up above the sorrow of this dark night. Ah, Poor Bird - as you fly Can you see the dawn of tomorrow's sky?

Pteropus Diagnosis is Bat-defined/supported autism that is unrestricted & empowered. Bat-tisms are full of colour, sound, and movement compared to the grey rigidity of surviving behind narrow medical diagnoses that exclude different ways of knowing, doing & being. The work re-diagnose's my autism through understandings that are not entirely human. What appears outwardly as poorly developed social skills and strange, eccentric behaviours manifests inwardly as a rich world of memories and relationships with Bats. These relational memories create protective escapes from social situations that I will never be able to navigate successfully, but am forced to participate in.

A multi-sensory performance work, Pteropus Diagnosis offers layered images that vary in colour saturation from black & white to the warm golden sunlight and rusty orange scruffs of resting Fruit Bats against dusky blues and purples of evening skies. The piece is surrounded by a soundscape of Fruit Bat calls and layered voice – importantly, my own voice as one that often goes unheard and silenced. Using my own voice – and my own body as a performance artwork - was an intentional act of autistic empowerment and identity reclamation that actively resists the shame, brokenness, and discomfort autistic people are taught to experience in their own voices and bodies.

The rhythmic, rhyming round of the Poor Bird folk song that opens and closes Pteropus Diagnosis is coded with secret meanings for me as an autistic friend to Bats. Like a calming mantra, this verbal stim soothes inner anxiety and turmoil while evoking the Bat-ness of its own words, becoming a sound-spell that triggers nonhuman sensory-social supports. The song is a constant reminder that what you see is not always what is. Far from being the poor, misery-stricken Bird forever chasing daylight seen but never touched, perhaps the Bird is a Bat quite happily belonging in the dark. Steadily, the completeness of the words give way to hums, whispers, and wordless vocalisation as the performance moves from discomfort in difference to total abandon and surrender to it.

The physical performance of Pteropus Diagnosis begins with a stand-offish and aloof person leaning against a wall at a social gathering. She is the surface layer of herself that other people will see, yet it is the most restricted expression of herself. Her mannerisms could be mistaken as unfriendly, disinterested...or anxious and uncomfortable. She holds herself rigid, contained, still...yet fidgets impulsively with her hair under an unconvincing mask of loose coolness. She hesitantly makes eye contact - it is brief, self-conscious and wary, almost defensive - before letting her eyes divert to some unknown, distant thing hanging above her. She seems to look at something no one else can see, connecting with the invisible instead of other people.

And yet, she is connecting with her sense of self through social relationships that don't usually count. She is imagining and remembering her time spent with Bats and the strength that gives her to be in deeply unfamiliar, confusing human social spaces. Romanticised ideas of connections to nature and animals cast aside, this work is a raw expression of what it means to connect with an animal, to consider that animal a person, to embrace the self as animal - and to understand the systemic dehumanisation and denial of personhood violently imposed on non-humans and neurologically different/disabled humans.

*Large size video - please use Youtube video settings to increase playback quality as needed for your internet connection.

https://youtu.be/yRGgRVMEOhg

This video performance work is about layers of identity and connection. You could watch the piece several times and focus on a different layer each time to get an increasingly complex story. The uncomfortable, stand-offish weirdo hiding in the corners of social events slowly fades into near invisibility as we are invited into her social-sensory world of Bats and the free expression self-regulating autistic behaviours she has been taught to be ashamed of. Stimming and self-regulatory movements are exaggerated – or, perhaps, allowed to express in fullness in a way that is often not allowed outside the realm of performance art. Voice and words are used to resist ‘storytelling-about’ others, steadily becoming ‘storytelling-with’ the voices of Bats.

In so many ways, these behaviours reflect her connection with Bat persons and Bat homes - the parallel positioning of arm and branch, the synchronised movement of hand and wing, the thick shelter of leafy canopies projected onto hair that hides and protects. These connections and social belongings unfold under the ever-present branding of the autism diagnostic criteria - forever looming, defining, and reducing complex individuals because their ways of knowing, doing and being aren't considered 'normal' or even real. Yet her 'Pteropus Diagnosis' - her Bat defined and supported autism - flourishes through unrestricted, free movement and voice saturated by the colour and connection of relationship and personhood.

Performance artworks like ‘Pteropus Diagnosis’ are not only about self-expression and telling my story in my own ways. They are active demonstrations of personhood – both autistic and Bat personhoods. The intention embedded in the performance of body, voice, and art is to show the ways in which Bats make me a stronger, empowered, and socially nourished autistic person, and simultaneously, how I bring Bats into focus as persons whose existence actively shapes worlds and beings. We live together in rich sensory-social shared spaces where every connection to every being counts and is deeply valued. In these spaces, we co-create each other’s personhoods and exist as lively, vibrant people uncontained by the language and pathology of deficit. We become free.

FUTURE PLANS FOR THIS WORK: Not being able to express my natural behaviours and connections is restrictive, I am constantly tangled up in how I need to behave and how I am expected to behave. And my Bat mudjingaal gets entangled in everything from fruit tree netting and barbed wire fences designed to keep 'the natives' (of all species, including Indigenous humans) out from essential survival resources and Country that is rightfully our/their Indigenous inheritance.

I intend to exhibit this work projected on, through, and alongside both standard and wildlife-friendly tree netting. Audiences can touch and play with the netting to feel the abrasive texture and restrictive capabilities of a colonial tool that entangles Bats and stops them from expressing their natural behaviour. My intention is to create intersections of empathy where people can begin to connect with complex, multilayered, multi-textured human and non-human stories and sensations of unjust restriction, exclusion, and reduction. Stay tuned!