Midsumma carnival and performance
Midsumma Carnival
IHRA is hosting an Intersex Community Stall at the Midsumma Carnival Picnic this Sunday (20 January 2019). It’s a fun day with lots of entertainment, food stalls etc., and an opportunity for intersex people to represent themselves and raise awareness of who we are! It’s important we are present for this. The stall is not branded as being by IHRA, and all intersex people are welcome. We hope the AISSGA will also be present.
As the focus of the intersex community stall is on raising awareness, human rights and our needs in terms of all the things mentioned in the Darlington Statement, our stall is located adjacent to the Victorian Gay & Lesbian Rights Lobby, Australian GLBTIQ Multicultural Council. We Are Union Pride, Victorian Ombudsman, Reason Party of Victoria, the Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission, and St Kilda & Fitzroy Legal Service.
The festival hours are 11am to 5pm, and our stall will be located at Henley Reserve at the Alexandra Gardens (3 Boathouse Dr, Melbourne VIC). Our stall number is 12D.
All intersex people and our families/partners/children/allies are welcome to come and visit and meet up with each other, and I would also appreciate volunteers to staff the stand during the day. If you can volunteer a few hours on the day, either to help set up or pack up, or during the day to talk to people, please let me know asap via email: tony.briffa@briffa.org.
People are also welcome to come and help during the day even without notice. I will be there for the full day, setting up the stall at 8am.
Celebrating intersex bodies
Bonnie Hart (Australia) and Kelly O’Shea (Aotearoa/NZ) will talk at 6.30pm on Friday 1 February about refocusing understandings of intersex:
Still frequently presented as a problem to be fixed – both medically and socially – intersex people continue fighting for the right to exist without being subjected to discrimination and non-consensual medical procedures. Featured BODY artists and activists Kelly O’Shea (New Zealand/Aotearoa) and Bonnie Hart (Aus) come together to discuss the ways that we can refocus our understandings of intersex, and instead celebrate intersex bodies for their beauty and strength.
POISE by Kelly O’Shea
POISE, by Kelly O’Shea
An immersive installation by Kelly O’Shea , visitors are invited to experience, one at a time, “an experience of both confrontation and solace”:
POISE is an immersive installation that seeks to challenge societal norms and understandings about our bodies, through the construction of a physical environment.
Subject to predominant social conditioning, our bodies are affected and altered at the whims of what is widely considered normal. By entering this immersive installation, intersex artist Kelly O’Shea encourages participants to interact with an environment that reinterprets our altered bodies as a physical space. Informed largely by personal experiences of medical intervention, POISE is a redemptive act; challenging and redefining structural expectations of our own personal experiences.
HR by Bonnie Hart
HR, by Bonnie Hart
Bonnie hart will perform “an industrial manifesto on beauty, labour and embodiment”:
The familiar whirr of film projectors set the sound stage for this industrial manifesto on the economic value of labour and the clinical experimentation of beauty by artist, filmmaker and intersex human rights activist Bonnie Hart. Mounted atop an exercise bike for three hours, like an exercising animal in her own experiment, sweat will be harvested from Hart’s body in a manner similar to the tears induced in rabbits during laboratory testing for new beauty products.
Consent festival
Midsumma will open on Saturday 19 January with a day festival on consent, and Elise Nyhuis (Victorian rep for AISSGA) will speak in a 3.30pm session on consent in health:
Consent in Health is moderated by writer and queer youth worker Bobuq Sayed investigating the role of health organisations and how consent intersects with accessibility, along with Ayman Barbaresco, Elise Nyhuis and Amao Leota Lu.
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