‘Careless People’ (written in December 2020) speaks to a certain labor that accompanies  touch, especially with someone new. An emotional labor, "Oh the time it takes to clear my  mind of you" (‘Careless People’ Lyric, Senna-Marie) but a physical labor too with  carelessness as a precursor to the loss of desire to labor, and arguably to a loss in desire  generally, "it's not worth the mess between us, no!". 

Affect theorist, Lauren Berlant speaks to how "even [when] desire fails to find objects  adequate to its aim, its errors can still produce pleasure: desire’s fundamental ruthlessness  is a source of creativity that produces new optimism, new narratives of possibility” (Lauren  Berlant, Desire and Love, 2012). Natasha Brown’s interpretation of ‘Careless People’,  through the lens of her own practise, has brought out this “new optimism” in her playfully  awkward handling of bodies that come to touch - a coat with two bodies inside, knees and  chins bumping.  

Natasha Brown's current research towards her final MAFA submission explores the reveal  of a magic trick: "There is a tension... between sincerity and cynicism" she says, "that  transfers itself onto the [magic] trick” (Natasha Brown, 2022). She goes on to call this  cynicism "a soft cynicism, a light letting-down cushioned by a humanness and an  awkwardness." (Natasha Brown, 2022) There's a similar soft cynicism throughout the lyric,  teased out by Ryan Schultze, with bright bells, mock smokey bass and slimy guitar riffs.  Altogether, this piece reads with a certain humor. It's not that we're finding the failure itself  humourous I don't think, rather it's so intolerably unavoidable that it's hard not to laugh at  our humanness. 

Natasha started with an uncanny pair of limbs, severed just as one might imagine a magic  trick alluding to, but caricatured into papier-mâché skin and permanent marker veins. This  'severing' forms a kind of fetishised depiction of failure (the failed desire but the failed magic  too) - the "sawing a woman in half is just two separate people contorted in a box in a  committed awkwardness" (Natasha Brown, 2022) - about as close to magic as a severed  papier-mâché leg.  

Affect theorist and quantum physicist, Karen Barad explains that separations (cuttings,  divisions, breakages and differences) are configured, reconfigured, stabilized or resisted in  order to yield certain results, saying that “Individuals, then do not pre-exist” (Karen Barad,  2012), we manicure the spaces between things. We create boundaries, emotional and  physical. Karen Barad explains how touch, on a subatomic level, is far from the meeting of  two physical entities: It is a sensation derived from the furious repelling of electrons (Karen  Barad, 2012). I think the same humor persists here, I mean why would we expect anything  less logical from matters of sensation and desire, than for the subatomic analysis to be the  opposite of our perception. The breakage, the boundary, the carelessness and the cutting -  the not letting someone occupy space inside one's own mind. This collaboration outlines a  blur between individuals -repelled, embraced and ultimately laughable.