I Live in a House With a Door, 2022

*Please contact the artist for video documentation or a copy of the text included in the performance

I Live in a house with a door is a performance work exploring the material of flesh through a narrative of cruising, erotic potential, environmental futures and discursive time.
Rosenfeld explores her flesh as a collaborative material moving in its own time and space. Through dancing with breath and flesh, Rosenfeld culminates this experience with a science-fiction text, where they implicate themself in an erotic cruising scene with an invisible gas called the Shimmer. The Shimmer effects both the physicality and emotionality of her relationship to flesh as material, while also implicating bodies of flesh in questions of climate change, natural disasters, and queer sexuality. Through this work, Rosenfeld arrives at the realisation of their non-binary identity through the materiality of their body, rather than through the marker of her gender. In a resistant relationship to metaphor, Rosenfeld collaborates and experiments with their own flesh and the possibilities it presents within its own autonomy and rhythm. In this dialogue with matter, they pose questions of assumption and responsibility regarding environmental shifts, while also offering a body of excess, their own flesh, as an alternative energy source for a future. The title for this work references the text, Time is a thing a body moves through by T Fleischmann.

The FULL iteration of this work PREMIERED in 2022 at The Anti Festival, Koupio, Finland as part of the Short List Live Art Prize in Which Liz Rosenfeld was nominated for.
Further info on the Short List Live Art Prize: https://www.liveartprize.com/info2022.

Text Written about ‘I Live In a House With a Door’ by The Short List Live Art Prize Jury for the 2022 Anti Festival
Prize Jury: Robin Deacon, Anna Teuwen and Gabi Ngcobo
LINK: https://antifestival.com/en/live-art-prize-jurys-statement-2022
Breath, body and desire… to watch Liz Rosenfeld’s performance is a pleasure, a gift, a revelation. In all our interactions with this body of work, the jury was taken by Liz’s special ability to create co-presence as a caring practice. The bond between the audience and those performing was often tangible, both in the documentation and the live experience of the work. This is alongside a sense of community generated in their methods of working – a collaborative ethos is clearly central to their practice.

In conversation with the jury, Liz spoke of a pleasure in “building a body of work over your whole life.” As well as a beautifully constructed portfolio, they shared a phenomenally well written piece of text with us on the practice of cruising that was incredibly effective in the way their voice merged with, and emerged from the writing. That this kind of pleasurable melding of voice and text is central to Liz’s practice was also apparent in their performance for ANTI, I live in a house with a door.

The jury were impressed and moved by their sensual use of the body as material, that gave vivid, touching and unexpected images to seemingly unimaginable feelings. That there still remained the possibility for humour in Liz’s work was refreshing, particularly in relation to the depictions of risk and danger (both covert and overt) that have come into play in much of their work.

This piece was shown as a work in progress:
Steakhouse Live, London, UK, 2020
Bergen Assembly, Bergen, NO, 2019 
Mapa Teatro, Bogotá, Colombia, 2019 *work-in-progress showing (Between Ecologies of Flesh)