Femmecide Pandemic, 2021.
Performance video (still)
Online performance event with live Q&A: 22 May, 8 - 9pm CEST. Book tickets here. £7
Performance film, available after 22 May. Pay per view here. £7

Also available: Softback copy of script £25 + postage and shipping | Hardback handbound script, signed by artist with intro and colour plates £350 + postage and shipping (purchase by emailing info@almanacprojects.com) | Femmecide Pandemic: The Royal T-Shirts


As the fourth correspondent for Love Letters, Astrid Korporaal and Basia Sliwinska invite Mx. Amanda Millis. Support the All-Poland Women’s Strike and the artist by purchasing tickets for the performance, bound scripts or the artworks below (by emailing info@almanacprojects.com).


‘You, no I,
I need a miracle’ *

Transmuting the physical sensations of vulnerability and solidarity into a new performance work, Amanda Millis presents Femmecide Pandemic (2021). The work is enacted in a space that combines acute intimacy with neoliberal anonymity: the bathtub of a rented Airbnb apartment. How has the global pandemic and its occupation of private spaces worsened violence against womxn? We will never know what has happened behind closed doors this past year. But we can, perhaps, spur our imagination by reflecting on the violence and trauma we have experienced ourselves, however much we try to hide it.

‘...my presence demands generosity, do you still want to give?’

Millis performs several roles in this performance, enacting a dialogue between victim and oppressor, teacher and student, mother and son. As these subject positions confront each other in the cramped space of the bathtub, we sense some of the naked discomfort that is necessary to acknowledge just how closely violence touches our lives. Breaking with the tasteful distancing of the art experience, Millis faces us with a demand for care. This demand, if taken seriously, calls for more than empathy in response to the sadness, pain and vulnerability of another. It calls for an acknowledgement of anger and the ways injustice is embedded into our systems of civilisation. It calls for a deep reflection on the care we need and the ways our own comfort excludes others from care.

‘...material reality...’

The performance video is interspersed with images of police action in public streets, the destruction of Palestinian buildings, and activist texts. These fragments of language, architecture and surveillance demonstrate a grammar of violence that punctuates our inner landscapes. The difference is that these structures were designed to protect some and not others. They signify the familiarity of harm for some, and the permission to look away for others. What is acceptable and respectable? Who is accountable, and who is allowed to keep accounts? The habits of ‘civilised’ society enable some to dismiss and deny these images, but the price of dissociation is a loss of connection, learning and relation for everyone.

The Royal Mask, 2021.
Performance artifact, collage and painting on stretched canvas. 52 x 32 cm.

Purchase by emailing info@almanacprojects.com
(700 pounds + postage and shipping)


‘...feelings and care and truth and justice…restorative, reparative…responssssssse-able…’

At the same time, there is humour and healing in this work, as an unsolicited penile photograph is transformed into a mask for the patriarchal image of the harmless schoolboy. Another mask turns queen and progeny into a mouthpiece for a disturbing mixture of oedipal fantasy and intergenerational mistakes. We are allowed to laugh at the absurdity of this system, where womxn’s bodies mean everything and nothing, and the image of a phallus can reproduce itself infinitely and innocently through the digital sphere. More importantly, we are allowed to look, to speak, and to heal.

Little Timmy Mask, 2021
Performance artifact, collage and painting on stretched canvas. 30 x 42 cm.

Purchase by emailing info@almanacprojects.com
(500 pounds + postage and shipping)


‘...love…’

The materiality of healing is collaborative, shared, resonant. Healing is necessary care labour and it is via healing that we learn to resist, thrive and survive in any circumstances. We choose to heal, we choose to love to nurture the growth of others and our own. Practice love against abuse. Practice justice. Commit to truth-telling. Commit to care. The gesture of care re-symbolises vulnerabilities via mutuality, reciprocity and generosity. Materials of care matter.

Paintings of eyes covering eyes. Hands covered with honey, oil, and herbs; moulding and being moulded by the clay of the earth. The wild za’atar that has travelled from a contested land, an occupied area, from Palestine, to help us rest and heal. Our trauma doesn’t disappear, but it transforms and re-signifies.

‘...you were born to be loved…’


*Excerpts from Amanda Millis, Femmecide Pandemic, 2021

Amanda Millis is an American-born, London-based artist-writer-educator whose practice explores the connections amongst femme desire, disability, and community-led art making. Shx weaves together performance, sculpture, and narrative in attempts to generate anti-colonial feminism. Millis sees hxr teaching and art practice as inextricably linked. Recent work includes I am not disabled; the institution is disabled, Wellcome Collection, London; Design Foundation Lecturer, Brunel University, London; Fine Art Lecturer, University of the Arts, London; Politics of Looking Film Festival, ICA, London; Family Forming through HIV, Open City Documentary Festival, London; Psychosocial Lecturer, Goldsmiths, London; Debate at Tate, Tate Modern, London. Millis also works trans-nationally, with a community-studio practice in Hebron, Palestine. Shx has previously been the recipient of arts grants from the Brooklyn Arts Council and the New York Department of Cultural Affairs for hxr community-arts project, Womxn’s Work.