Looking through the lens of feminism, bodily knowledges and ancestral memory, we host an intersectional discussion on how the body is a contested territory, and how dreaming, ritual and myth allow us to understand the social body and consciously transform the world around us. This discussion echoes lines of enquiry present in Citra Sasmita's Into Eternal Land is on display in The Curve from Thursday 30 January to Monday 21 April 2025.  

Citra’s incredible body of work considers the feminine in relation to land and ancestry, ritual and memory. She uses materials such as cow hide in the exhibition downstairs to point towards marks and traces of the being that once wore the skin, walked in it, was scarred by life and marked by travel Citra has embroidered gems, traditionally used in the foundations of Balinese houses, into the hides so they look in some way like their own maps. She blends the human with nature and exposes the raw transformative potential of creation. In her work women give birth to trees, they sprout freely, almost joyfully from the groin, stomach and heads of the figures, who bear relation to the imagery and storytelling of many Goddess cultures. I’m reminded of Nisha Ramayya’s extraordinary book States of the Body Produced by Love.

The imagery of halos of fire, or curled snakes is channelled through Citra’s own Balinese heritage, and also shares DNA with many representations of esoteric, philosophical or religious knowledge systems. The more time you spend with her works, the more associations and unfolding become clear like looking into a magic eye, one has to click into a certain space to see. 

In thinking of this panel, I was reminded of Lynn Margulis’ text Gaia and Philosophy, published  and edited by Sarah Shin of Silver press who has co-curated the next talk and events in the Conservatory. Gaia is referred to in this text as a “body in the form of a planet”, and as microbiologist Lynn Margulis was looking into the building blocks of life here on earth in its smallest cellar iterations, and considering the world as a patchwork of symbiotic organisms, a large teeming whole of interreliant life. Whilst Lynn waded in mud to extract and look through the microscope, her former partner Carl Sagan was looking to the outer edges of the universe through the telescope - it’s all a question of perspective. Looking above and below, and internally and externally these maps, or somatic cosmologies are built through our individual skins, cells and energies, and conversely we expand outward, creating building and contributing to what we call the world and ever expanding universe. We are the drop and the ocean. Here Citra’s work and the work of Nikita, Ariana and Daisy all consider and perform the body, and through the body point to our larger social and political reality and body politic. Our fleshy, compromised, tired, sick corporeal forms become a locus of the forces that act upon us and point to what we can and cannot stomach, the moments at which we bend, break and bleed. 

There are some specific feminist arteries that run through Citra’s exhibition, overt in her depiction of women’s bodies as splitting, bleeding and birthing nature or flaming and powerful at the font of knowledge and self enlightenment, and embedded in her use of ritual and heritage, specifically in her reclamation of the Indonesian Kamasan painting technique, traditionally the remit of men and shared specialised elder. Here Citra has learned it, and undergoing a ritual herself to create the visions in the long worlds, they are not linear but instead she begins with a vision and follows it tangentially, one gives from to the next as a network, rhizome or cell structure of imagery and semiotics. 

As a yoga teacher and hypnotherapist I'm always fascinated by the mind body connections, and the role of language as a bridge. Altered states in this case can only be entered with the guide of language, and I’m delighted to be joined today by three of my favourite and most visionary poets, Nikita Gill, Ariana Reines and Daisy Hildyard. 

The panel have kindly agreed to immerse us in their worlds and practice, by kicking off the panel with readings. Before this however, I’d like to invoke Citra and her words by reading one of her poems. As well as being an incredibly talented and visionary artist, she is a poet and has published this book of poetry:  

Acknowledgements:

Thanks to Grace, Reena, George, John and the whole creative collaboration team, and to Devyani for her support. Special thanks to curator  Lotte Johnson for bringing such a spectacular exhibition to the curve, if you haven’t seen Citra Sasmita Into Eternal Land yet, it’s free please do go along afterwards, and thanks to Citra herself for the chance to immerse ourselves in her world and consider nuance and synchronicity with language and themes in the work of Nikita Gill, Ariana Reines and Daisy Hildyard. It’s a true honour to be joined by them here today and I’m really excited for our conversation on how mapping the body and our own subjective experience can help us to understand and even change the world.  

Introductory text by Susanna Davies-Crook