Jude (EXTRACT)

HD video for streaming online with sound, 1 minute 21 seconds, 2020

(This is an edited extract of Jude, HD video for projection with sound, 25 minutes, 2020)

The work explores a traumatised maternal subject in an extended state of metaphorical tongue-tie, complicating ideas around maternal embodiment, voice and silencing. It layers the exploration of a persona with a rupturing of body, sound and voice, weaving archival and online footage, linear narrative and abstracted images together. Jude Rose adds their drumming as a soundtrack to the story.

Jude addresses the transformation of an Orthodox Jewish Rebbetzin (Rabbi’s wife) in a British Synagogue to a single, non-binary person coming to terms with their parenthood, religious identity, sexuality and gender, using the Internet as a way of forging new possibilities for their existence and self-expression.

Jude Rose, born “Judith” in Leeds to an extremely religious Jewish family, grew up in the Orthodox confines of a highly organised and closed community. At a young age, they were coerced into marrying the Rabbi of a highly visible London community. They had three daughters but they felt they had never actively chosen pregnancy and could never reconcile their own relationship with the ideals of maternity understood in that context. Finally, in 2013, Jude divorced their husband and was excluded from their community and family. Recently, changing their name to Jude, they started to live their life in freedom, completing a lifelong dream to study music. Even though Jude is a "digital native", Jude grew up in a non-digital culture. However, they have has come to use technology, social media and the Internet as tools for exploring their performance of self and the construction of an alternative network of friends around their new identity. As one of those friends, and an active member of the Jewish community that Jude is excluded from, this work has a particular bearing on my own activity as a (m)other researching what it means to “speak” through tongue-tied maternality.