PASTLIVES

PASTLIVES is a long-term research project by SasaHara exploring mythologies and the politics agency in a white cis-male dominated world. In this multidisciplinary work they account for the space between queer voices and mythmaking – a force which can either solidify identities in their fantastical construction or marginalize them in the course of barring such ways of expression. Though queer identities have always existed they lack representation, as their stories have been kept quiet in the passage from oral to written storytelling. “What happens to the myths that haven’t been written down, and yet keep echoing?” SasaHara challenges this heteronormative caging by invoking forgotten oniric queer lives and channelling them into a place to exist for eternity, using their voice as the catalyst. They collaborate with a team of queer artists to give physicality to their mythological storytelling works and invite the audience into an alternative reality that is knitted through their own experience of queerness, indicating the radical necessity of storytelling at its core. The architecture of their mythology is formed through writing independent stories inspired by lived experiences and the unpacked emotions they generate. Their use of fantasy provides an extremely metaphorical style leaving organic space for the myth to create itself in its web of associations. In all, PASTLIVES is an effort that takes SasaHara’s drag-transformism practice into new heights by presenting an immersive multimedia theatre-work where drag, fantasy, text, performance, visual and audio work all converge in a cosmology of queerophantasmic stories.