Jamila Main
Jamila Main is a queer, disabled artist, and an ambulatory wheelchair user, whose candid, joyful, and intimate work delves into the nuances of disability, queerness, and tender tension. Jamila was a Carclew Fellow and Sharehouse Resident, a researcher at Back to Back Theatre; is a Co-Chair of the Equity Diversity Committee; and sits on the Equity National Performer’s Committee, an Advisor for Australian Plays Transform, and a disability consultant and advocate.
Alongside being an artist, Jamila is an actor, playwright, and disability consultant and has worked with organisations including Sydney Theatre Company, Darlinghurst Theatre Company, Malthouse Theatre, Adelaide Festival, State Theatre Company of South Australia, Adelaide Cabaret Festival, Vitalstatistix, Midsumma Festival, and ActNow Theatre.
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Jamila Main, Pillow Talk, 2022
10 minutes 47 seconds, single-channel video, sound.
For Conductive Site.
Access Statement
Pillow Talk is a 10 minute single-channel video work.
Visual Description
Jamila, a slender white person with light brown hair in a bisexual bob, lies under white sheets in bed. Jamila wears a navy blue nightie. By the end of the video, Jamila has moved from lying on their back to grimacing in pain on their stomach.
Captioned Content Notes
Brief mention of death, references to drugs and medication, mild references to consensual and non consensual pain infliction and BDSM coded language.
Transcript
A PDF transcript of spoken text in Pillow Talk can be viewed here.
Concept and Performance: Jamila Main
Director: Ruby Allegra
Producer: Pillow Fight
Makeup and Videography: Ruby Allegra
Special thanks to Nory Saudie.
I made this work in my bed on unceded Kaurna Yerta in Tandanya (so called Adelaide), on unceded Wurundjeri and Bunurong land in so called Melbourne. I pay my respects to Kaurna and Wurundjeri people, storytellers, and Elders. I extend that respect to the Indigenous people, storytellers, and Elders who are watching this, and to everyone whose land this work is watched on. I recognise my disabled ancestors and peers, whose activism, fight, and sacrifices gave me the rights I have today. I promise to continue their work to make the world a more accessible and safe place for my disabled descendants.
about the artwork
Sapphic pain poems to fall into bed with.
Pick up your phone. Slide into bed. Rest your head.
Pillow Talk invites the audience into bed with creator and performer Jamila Main for a series of poems charting the flare up of pain both emotional and physical. The work is vulnerable, candid, and uninhibited in an intimate one-on-one format between the prerecorded performer and the live but remote audience member.
Under the covers, Jamila shares the joys and agonies of sapphic yearning bound within a disabled, chronically ill, queer body in chronic pain. Pillow Talk takes place in the online space so often inhabited by disabled, queer people as they love, find solidarity, and connect. This precious haven is shared with the removed audience member through the familiar gaze of the video call, revealing a raw, rarely seen landscape of disabled intimacy.
A transcript of the poems read in Pillow Talk can be viewed here.
about Conductive Site
Conductive Site is an online program of artworks by six diverse, interdisciplinary artists – Hanna Cormick, Riana Head-Toussaint, Shareeka Helaluddin, Lost all Sorts Collective, Jamila Main, and Daniel Savage – curated by interdisciplinary disabled/crip artist Riana Head-Toussaint.
This collective of artists is unified by a shared interest in grappling with issues of space as it relates to agency, care, community, liberation, reclamation, perception, and disconnection – as well as our prescribed and unprescribed understanding of what it means to “access” space. Unfurling here on the Firstdraft website, Conductive Site aims to create movement, conversation and change through radical re-considerations of so-called public space.
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