KickQueen (2020) multi-media installation with KickQueen – the Body, 12-min short film, two-channel sound, KickQueen – the Icon, kinetic sculpture with two-channel sound, aluminum, wood, PLA and KickQueen – the Story, aluminum sheets, photography, text.
KickQueen (2020) takes a gesture from the October 2019 protests in Lebanon as its main element. The project extracts this kick that a female protestor gave to an armed body-guard in his crotch while extrapolating the limits of its representation as a revolutionary icon and resuscitating it as an embodied possibility for Lebanese women. An installation made of a kinetic sculpture with sound, an experimental film, and metal-printed photographs, KickQueen is a semi-fictional, semi-factual reflection on the role of women in the 2019 uprisings and the Lebanese political scene. Borrowing from the concept of traumatic loops, repetition, successions, progressions, and interruptions became the aesthetic principle in the film KickQueen–The Body, revealing the interrelatedness between gesture as physical movement and gesture as visual technique permeating the image’s temporality.
In the imaginary realm of the KickQueens, M.A breaks time’s cyclicality when she hits an armed man in the crotch. She takes Lebanon out of its traumatic loop and into a linear dimension where progress is possible. KickQueen (2020) is a magic potion against forgetting. It asks us to remember what it means to kick an armed man in the crotch and how this gesture might live in an embodied collective.
To Lebanese women: Lebanon will not change until YOU kick patriarchy in the crotch.
Role:
Concept, Writing, Performance, Editing, Sound, Design, Art Direction
Contributions:
Camera and color correction: Susanna Barlow
Sound assistance: Daniel Blackie
Sculpture technician: Nathyn Sanche
Photography: Yvette Tang
KickQueen – the Body (2020), 12-min short film, two-channel sound.
KickQueen – the Icon (2020), kinetic sculpture with two-channel sound, aluminum, wood, PLA.
“Is time metallic? What would happen if you gave time a blow of a hammer?
Why is the crotch the foot’s favorite target? When the foot touches the crotch, a portal opens. A portal to a dimension where time becomes linear again. At the point of impact, attacker and attacked go into a union. They occupy a subtle body that transcends the fight scene. The subtle dual body enters a whirlpool that twirls it back to 1975. From there, it gets projected into a realm where time and space are altered and where all memory is brought to the surface, sifted through, and then erased. ”
Ghinwa Yassine
KickQueen – the Story (2020), aluminum sheets, photography, text.
“A crack ---- an interruption ---- a foot ---- a crotch ---- a crack ---- an interruption ---- an impact ---- a foot ---- a crotch ---- a crack ---- an interruption ---- an impact ---- a thrust ---- a foot ---- a crotch ---- a crack ---- an interruption ---- an impact ---- a thrust ---- a union ---- a foot ---- a crotch ---- a crack ---- an interruption ---- an impact ---- a thrust ---- a union ---- a transcendence ---- a foot ---- a crotch.”
Ghinwa Yassine
KickQueen – the Icon (2020), kinetic sculpture with two-channel sound, aluminum, wood, PLA.
KickQueen – the Story (2020), aluminum sheets, photography, text.
“The ballerina on a wind-up musical box pirouettes until the mechanism’s gears stop turning. This usually lasts from 1 to 3 minutes. Her spinning is activated by the torque of the winding key. One gear engages into another, and the comb plays the music inscribed on a pinned wheel, while at the same time, turning a shaft assembly, upon which the ballerina stands.
If Lebanon was in a musical box, what song would be playing? ”
Ghinwa Yassine
KickQueen – the Story (2020), aluminum sheets, photography, text.