Ineffability

This photograph is a performance still from Ineffability by Twin Flame, photographed by Lucy Foster. Twin Flame are a Melbourne based performance duo: Keely Varmalis and Lea Rose. Ineffability is defined as something that is too great or extreme to be expressed in words. Within Ineffability, Twin Flame perform a non-verbal communicative song, using singular sounds to utter their collective pain, sadness and loss. This is echoed through the body, in the heavy black mourning dresses, and the copper leaves that adorn them, the women are carriers of change. Language is a sedimentation, building and burying the meanings of words within time. The language we use can uphold oppression. In this performance Twin Flame share a disdain for the communicative tools that are ingrained with the violence of subjugation. The two women express a clawing, choking anger, gripping their throats and gasping without relief, symbolising all the moments they have kept their frustration silent to please others. They hold slumped glass vessels against their bodies, their wombs, water held within becoming an amniotic fluid carried through the performance. They cry, siren’s screams, a public display of the weight of grief upon the body, and a promise to be silent no longer. Within the welded copper cave, Twin Flame call upon the strength of their dead loved ones to continue to fight for control of their voices and bodies.

– Twin Flame (Lea Rose (she/her) and Keely Varmalis (she/her))