True Love’s Kiss
Phoebe Osborne

 True Love’s Kiss is a listening essay by Phoebe Osborne

1 hour, 16 minutes

Sound design: Wibke Tiarks

The artist suggests listening to this as one would with a podcast episode; as you go about your day, in transit, paused to rest or in an act of domestic care - within a choreography of mundane living.

In observing ontological dances of suspension, transition, merging, and moving-through that occur in corridors and caverns, this essay investigates these environmental spaces as active architectures of transness on an expansive level. Leaning into three distinct areas; the geological realms of underwater limestone halocline caves, the physiology of the human throat and the voice that arrives from it, and the Disney animation The Little Mermaid, this thinking-through speculates on transness as an embodied mode of loving suspended in a continual state of change that can be found not just in human gender but expands to species, geology, elements, and time. The intimate relationality of these worlds and the trans-becoming they include argues for trans-becoming-ancient as a mode of true love.

To read the written version of Osborne’s 2022 essay True Love’s Kiss, click here.

Presented as part of Osborne’s 2022 exhibition Across this really tall field again in the dark.