‘Reclaim the Night’ by performance artist Chanje Kunda is an ambitious idea for a hybrid indoor immersive installation and outdoor performance that celebrates female sexual empowerment, using projection, pyrotechnics, performance and poetry. Chanje Kunda will tell the story of female sexual empowerment the way an astronomer guides us through the night sky. Constellations to meteor showers, can be a metaphor for an exploration of the beautiful and out of this worldness of female sexuality. Physiology of the female anatomy as a portal to another dimension, as magical as the galactic beauty of the night.
Female sexuality and sensuality’s depiction in the media and in the public domain is exploited, commodified and is typically demeaning and degrading and viewed as being without class. This representation belies the phenomenal nature of women, the ultimate truth of the sacred nature of our sexuality, the miraculousness of our physicality and the celestial nature of our bodies. This show aims for people to know that, but also to know that we’re all microcosms of a magnificent universe.
Chanje wants to be able to take all the subjugation women have had, burn it down and rise into the new dawn. ‘I feel like to somehow Reclaim the Night is all about reclaiming ourselves, reclaiming our bodies and reclaiming our right to experience joy. That necessarily means the joy of inhabiting our own bodies and knowing the nirvana our bodies are capable of experiencing, and the knowledge of self as a celestial body.’
The Hubble telescope has finally see galaxies of immeasurable beauty and in our hearts and in our minds, we long to engage. In this day and age, we have become even more disconnected from the reality of what actually is. Our bodies are a portal to another dimension. Our nervous system’s electrical strikes through synaptic skies, creates a chemical cascade in our body, that prepares our bodies for a relishing experience emotionally.
‘Moonbase’ will be a metaphor for the basis of the Reclaim the Night Movement. Lunar conditions of reduced gravity, extreme temperatures and toxic lunar dust could be used as a metaphor for the toxic experiences of sexual assault, sexual abuse and sexual harassment, inability to breathe. The loneliness. The struggle. The project will also look at Past and Present Reclaim the night movements.
