Systems of Pain/Networks of Resilience
Systems of Pain/Networks of Resilience: (Santa Fe) and (Portrait) (2017) in Feral Feminisms

Excerpts of (Santa Fe) and (Portrait) from Systems of Pain/Networks of Resilience were published in Feral Feminisms: The General Issue.











Performing Resilience for Systemic Pain (2022)

How might performance serve as a means for facing ubiquitous trauma and pain, in humans and ecologies?
While reflecting on my multidisciplinary work Systems of Pain/Networks of Resilience, I consider bodies of knowledge in Trauma Theory, Intersectional Feminist Philosophy, Ecology, Disability Studies, New Materialism, Object-Oriented Ontology, Gender Studies, Artistic Research, Psychology, Performance Studies, Social Justice, Performance Philosophy, Performance Art, and a series of first-person interviews in an attempt to answer that question. I write through the process of making the work and the real-life, embodied encounters with the theories explored within it as an expansion of the work itself. Facing down difficult issues like trauma, discrimination, and the vulnerability of the body, I looks to commonalities across species and disciplines as means of developing resilience and cultivating communities. Rather than paint a picture of glorious potential utopias, I takes a hard look at myself as an embodiment of the values explored in the work, and stays with the difficult, sucky, troubling, work to be done.
Performing Resilience for Systemic Pain is a vulnerable book about the quiet presence and hard looking needed to shift systems away from their oppressive, destructive realities.
Available now from Routledge. To request a review copy, fill out this form. Contact me for inquiries.
From a review by Ana Pais in TDR: The Drama Review, Volume 68 / Issue 1 / March 2024, p. 185-90:
“Like many performance artists, Meghan Moe Beitiks is invested in imagining and sustaining common futures through the collective enactment of affect, with a particular healing narrative. Her artist book “Performing Resilience for Systemic Pain” focuses on pain as an embodied experience that transcends the individual as pain is positioned within systemic structures of power. The volume follows the artistic process of her project “Systems of Pain/Networks of Resilience” (2015–2018): residencies (Nebraska,New York, and Santa Fe) in which Beitiks interviews locals with experiences in recovering from painful ordeals, culminating in the final exhibition of the project. “Things, people and places help us heal: we do not only heal ourselves” (24). This oft-repeated mantra shapes the book itself with soothing qualities—overflowing with care, vulnerability, and resilience. Connecting individual pain with collective pain and transforming it through artistic creation (whether directly involving the community or not) is one way the arts can contribute to sustaining affective networks, support resistance, and open spaces for raising awareness of the influence of affect in our lives. It’s a way of caring for the present and the future.
Highly aware of the cultural conditionings of both observation and feeling the world around us, Beitiks seeks to share the intentions of her artistic project: to demonstrate that “the forced distance of observation pulls the sighted viewer back into the reality of how they are looking at things, pulls them fully into the present” (18). Discerning affect, as Teresa Brennan would put it, and finding theright words to name bodily states and sensations is crucial to public health (Brennan 2004). That is also what Beitiks’s book aims to do by concentrating on three main operating concepts to work through and transcend the experience of pain: observation, description, and listening. These allow us to displace our common perception of the world, revealing the systemic influence of structures of power as well as raising awareness of our attachments to people, situations, values, etc. Hence, accepting pain, instead of fighting it, can strengthen resilience; discerning the damages of pain can leverage the fight. Artistic projects such as this connect singular experiences within a network of awareness,which is crucial to supporting collective subjectivities and actions, precisely because art has the potential to build narratives that help healing the pain. Such artistic activations can touch our hearts.
As mobilizing forces, love and hope can work to fuel political resistance and action so vigorously that they may quiet pain. This is a challenge for democracy, for the capacity of doing things together, for the capacity of imagining the ancestral future and maintaining the vibrancy of affective mobilization. Without artistic practices such as Beitiks’s, change has less of a chance to stick, despite its apparent visible impact on specific actions of protest. Pain needs to be cared for, individually and collectively, for as much as it can inflame political and artistic action it can also destroy bodies and hearts alike.” — Ana Pais, “Mobilizing and Sustaining Affect: Collective Awareness as Leverage for Social Change,” Concerning Books, TDR: The Drama Review, Volume 68 / Issue 1 / March 2024, p. 185-90


Systems of Pain/Networks of Resilience (Nebraska) (interconnections) (2021)
Systems of Pain/Networks of Resilience (Nebraska) has been published in the first issue of interconnections: journal of posthumanism. After the peer-review process I was made the journal’s first Creative Works Editor.

Systems of Pain/Networks of Resilience (Moment 2) (World Futures) (2020)
Systems of Pain/Networks of Resilience (Moment 2) has been published in the peer-reviewed World Futures, in an issue on Queer Conviviality, edited by Sacha Kagan.

Systems of Pain/Networks of Resilience (Exhibition) (2018)
Systems of Pain/Networks of Resilience (Exhibition) is a display of all of the chapters of the Systems of Pain/Networks of Resilience project in one gallery. Curated by Cecilia Vargas, on view at the Arrowhead Gallery in the Dickson Center at Waubonsee Community College, June 7-July 10th, 2018.
Photos courtesy of Waubonsee Community College.
Systems of Pain/Networks of Resilience (Moment 2) (2017)
A video following the material journey of a table through various sites from the Systems of Pain/Networks of Resilience project. Audio Describer Katie Murphy creates a soundtrack based on my research and interviews with project participants. Original table designed by Jason Friedes. An extended examination of observation and connection.
Systems of Pain/Networks of Resilience (Santa Fe) (2017)
A live performance, a chapter in Systems of Pain/Networks of Resilience. Interviews with Santa Fe locals about the diverted and hotly contested Santa Fe River. A performance with pinion logs, tablecloths, oranges, “Masculine” wallpaper, charcoal, and water from two points along the river. Plus two volunteer fishes. Audio description by Adam Harvey. Technical support by Alberto Romero. Thanks to the Santa Fe Art Institute. Photos by Jane Phillips.
Systems of Pain/Networks of Resilience (New York 2) (2017)
An interactive video chapter of the Systems of Pain/Networks of Resilience project, developed at the Wassaic Project and realized in full in the projects’ exhibition at the Dickson Center. Panels of “Masculine” wallpaper obscure the viewer’s experience of a video. Though they can hear an Audio Description of the work, as well as the voices of people from upstate New York, they can only view the video in its entirely by standing at a safe distance: not too close, not too far.





Systems of Pain/Networks of Resilience (Installation One) (2016)
As part of the Studios Midwest Residency in Galesburg, Illinois, I created Systems of Pain/Networks of Resilience (Installation One) at Knox College’s Gallery The Box.
The piece featured documentation from SOP/NOR (Nebraska) on display in digital frames, as well as quotes from interviews for the piece in picture frames. The ashes of the broken/reassembled table from (Nebraska) were present, in a spilled jar, and the hardware from that table was used to secure the various cables in the installation. Various other props and artifacts from the (Nebraska) performance were also included.
The Box shares its space with Johnson Wallcovering Company, which features a “Masculine Wallpaper” section. Among the log cabin and sailboat patterns was a “Pine Trail” Wallpaper of no particular visual stereotype or gendered connotation. I include this wallpaper in the installation as a way of questioning the gender assignment of this particular depiction of nature.
Systems of Pain/Networks of Resilience is an exploration of observation as a tool for recovery from imbalance and trauma in human and non-human processes. I interview people with personal and professional experience with processes of recovery, then draw upon those interviews to create performance scores, videos and installations.
Systems of Pain/Networks of Resilience (Compilation: Words and Fields) (2016)
Presented at RIXC Open Fields Conference in Riga, Latvia, 2016.
Systems of Pain/Networks of Resilience (New York) (2016)
Part of Systems of Pain/Networks of Resilience (sop-nor.tumblr.com/). Created at Residency 108.
Systems of Pain/Networks of Resilience (Nebraska) (2016)
Systems of Pain/Networks of Resilience is an exploration of observation as a tool for recovery from imbalance and trauma in human and non-human processes. In (Nebraska), I interview a naturalist, a political scientist, a physical trainer, a representative of the Nebraska Humane Society, a woodworker, a Hospital Chaplin, and a number of individuals and artists who are in recovery from physical or emotional trauma. The interviews create a performance score for a live performance and video, compelling a number of interactions with everyday objects, and a specially designed table by Jason Friedes. Photos by Colin Conces/Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts.