The performance lecture is punctuated by small acts of annihilation, and so evokes shock, the dramatisation of violence, which is the violence of abstraction, industrialisation, of ultimately not knowing, being alienated from what things are and where they come from. Something that is present at the start of life, milk, and so, at least in fantasy, a sign of nurture and care, is also enmeshed in deadliness, in precarity, in social stigmatisation. Milk is taken apart, recomposited and refitted in an age that demands flexible de- and recomposition, agile refitting of all, for all, in terms of bodies, work, capital. At stake is how milk, and all that might be derived from milk, is taken possession of, in various ways. There is a hint, in the very messy excess of it all, that milk, like Proteus, evades capture, spills, squirts and disobeys.

The performance lecture conveys a knowledge of milk as chemical substance, as symbolic fluid, mythic matter, imaginative entity, organised around multiple coded gestures that emanate from milk: feeding, spilling, cosmetic application, separating, cutting, spraying, in the heavens in a remade Milky Way, or at our own mirrored bodies, as milk stands in for that other bodily fluid that is as much read as sign of life as death: blood.

Deeper in the Pyramid is also delivered across Grand Union in Birmingham (2 February-12 April) and Banner Repeater in London (26 May-29 July). See items in this repository: http://researchonline.rca.ac.uk/3366/, http://researchonline.rca.ac.uk/3493/, http://researchonline.rca.ac.uk/3513/.