STACEY SACKS

LUXURIOUS MIGRANT // PERFORMING WHITENESS

Stacey Sacks is a clown, a filmmaker, an activist, a visual artist and a researcher. Her diverse inter-disciplinary work experiments with different formats to reflect on whiteness and privilege and the performance of it. I wanted to invite Stacey Sacks to the first issue if VIS because her work embraces a unique mix of humour and activism. She uses the personality of the trickster to investigate power structures and white supremacy in the world of academics and Sweden in particular, yet starting with a robust self-critique. Her contribution Luxurious Migrant: performing whiteness – is a collage, mixing fanzine aesthetics with poetic animations and satire to make us smile and at the same time reflect on the privileges of contemporary western life.

Mia Engberg, Editorial committee

Biography

Stacey Sacks is a performer-writer-director-researcher-pedagogue-clown. Born and raised in Zimbabwe, Sacks studied Performance and Social Anthropology at the University of Cape Town and later completed the MA program, A Year of Physical Comedy, at the Stockholm Academy of Dramatic Art in 2012. Sacks is co-author of The Clown Manifesto (Oberon/Bloomsbury, 2015) and recently completed a PhD in Performative and Media Based Practices at Stockholm University of the Arts. Interested in trans-generational and intra-cultural haunting, Sacks experiments with auto-ethnography and productive discomfort in multi-modal ways, attempting to discover sharper ways of giving attention and making safe space for generative failure. Via a series of trans-disciplinary corporeal and material experiments, Sacks asks the question: how do I mobilize my positionality as a privileged body in the anti-colonial conversation?

Abstract: Stacey Sacks Doctoral Project This Untethered Buffoon or the Trickster in Everything takes form as a suite of hyper-disciplinary experiments with mask, clown, stop-motion animation, film, photography, sculpture, text, drawing and performance.

Drawing on Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s concept of ‘critical intimacy’ the performance-essay 'luxurious migrant' reflects on whiteness and privilege and the performance of it. As an intra-cultural, auto-ethnographic excavation it attempts and possibly fails to critically engage with notions of access, authority and power from within the cultural canon. As such it is a creative experimentation with theory and performance, an exploration of the improvisatory impulse and what it means to be ‘on’ the moment.

Since clown naturally contains transgressive elements, the project explores how the genre can be used in a neo-colonial context to subvert or interrupt the dominant discourse, whether satire and parody function as activism and if it is in fact possible to push back white supremacy through critical engagement and play, starting with a robust self-critique.