As an auto-ethnographic work, notes on mikvah necessarily relies on a moment in time; Its making was a process and, in becoming resolved into some semblance of a consumable object (in the first case, a film), it immediately became insufficient to mark or match any sort of present. The moment had not passed, just, the next one had already become. A film built around text, a diarised ritual obsession, returned to text through the publication of a sound description/(trans)script pamphlet [quiet static of the internal morning], made in engagement with critical conversations regarding access, audio descriptions and sound design. notes on mikvah, a desperate endeavour to come out as trans by/and addressing the strange resonance for me, as a religious (read: practising, not traditional) Jew, living next to a mikvah (which houses the Jewish water ritual purposed towards marking transitions between states), was a doomed cause - as all attempts for totality are. To try to pin down the inherent fluidity, the leakiness of me, of us, of our everything through the frameworks and beats of a religion that is proud of, borne of, leakiness, change, grappling, though, is a crucial, if not holy, synthesis. Albeit, doomed still. 

To do any sort of auto-ethnography is to repeat this: power pervades and positions. To make, at all, prerequisites the capacity, the power, the breath. Auto-ethnography in my hands - whilst my black transfem siblings die disproportionately of all, whilst there is genocide enacted in my name, whilst there is anything but interdependent freedom - is, if we are to be critical, a waste of time and power. Yet here, the first two evolutions of this work are archived in the present. Where they sing of a life-sourcing, radical diasporic Judaism that has fuelled meaning and justice work for generations, that so many are ready to forget has always existed; they stand as a reminder of the permeability of the body, of the walls between buildings, between bedrooms and blessings; they testify that fantasy is a desperately necessary technique of memory and of hope and reinforce telling-the-self as resistant. To stop telling is to give in.