Lou Lou Sainsbury

A vampiric trio facilitates the transition of a new host across a former limestone quarry and the sacred mountain grotto of Mary Magdalene, troubling the binaries of life, death, gender and parasitism. Monuments to female saints become poses of living queer memory, as skeletal remains are transformed with embellishments. A mosquito draws blood with its proboscis and hormones are drawn using a syringe, as the remnants of an extracted zone is now overgrown with lifeforms.

An erotic cosmic love story between three transing beings whose desire unfolds across time and space.

“On June 12th 1942, the Night Witches received their first baptism by fire. They were injected with the blood of the vampire bat, to see in the dark. They flew in wooden planes. No radar or radios. They had to be magic, they must have been drugged, or witches, or magic, to see in the dark. They were aged 17 to 26, the Night Witches. They dropped 23,000 tonnes of bombs on the fascists. ‘Be proud, you are a woman.’” Weaving a gothic-fantasy of the all-female Soviet WW2 bomber pilots the ‘Night Witches’, Membering the Night Witches presents an auto-baptism and auto-fertilisation calling for urgent antifascist liberation from our toxic selves. The intense improvised live performance is a noisy hymn for impossible queer longing, evoking psychic-political spirits from the undercurrents of transness, ecstasy and Christian mysticism.

Sunbeam gets surgery and is brought back to life. A doll of Sunbeam, a cute and chaotic personification of the sun invoking the trans Roman Empress Heliogabalus, is split open, remade and implanted with collected ‘resonant’ objects - a rib bone, a lock of hair, teeth, pharmaceutical hormones and a peach pit for a brain. Performed by the artist and filmed in her own bedroom and kitchen, the intimate film explores a domestic imaginary for restitching transfeminine histories, a communion with the dead and the sensual reinvention of a body with no end.