I joined a workshop yesterday entitled “Rewriting Gender”.
It was based on the idea of a “gender CV”, a document people in germany have to write up in order to gain access to gender affirming care; a document where they describe in bleak facts and stereotyped why they were actually always already the gender they are. To make sure, the gender affirming care would make sense, in a way.
We were a group of circa 10 people. Most of them queer and I believe I was the only cis-man. (A fact that stands to be contested, for myself mostly.)
In any case, to start us off, we were asked to make a list of things that are generally stereotypically more masculine or female - behaviour, hobbies, interests, clothes, aesthetics, etc.
We brainstormed categories and then brainstormed things to fit into these categories and made two lists (masc and femme). And while I know it was not the intent to re-ify a certain binary, it was a fascinating process to watch. There was always one person writing down things for the femme side and one person for the masc side and people would just sort of blurt out words and things and it would be assumed automatically (in most cases) who was supposed to put them on their list. In a way the sorting process was fully automated, the people writing assumed that everyone in the room knew or had a feeling for whether said thing was an example for masc or femme stuff.
I had a weird feeling at some point about how we were this group of supposedly extremely self-aware and society-aware people and here we were blurting out the most trodden-out stereotypes of binary gender perception, not questioning anything. Some of it felt like trauma-dumping, people would say how they had e.g. hobbies that would be prescribed to the “other” gender usually and how they were troubled by that. People would say that men had no problem with growing old for example, riffing off of the idea of how women have to be young and beautiful forever basically, in order to maintain societal value. Which is true and terrible, yet it felt very odd.
I felt out of place of sorts, being a queer man, the distinction of gender and sexual identity or orientation is an important one and should not be mixed up but at certain points I believe they inform each other. As a queer man I feel a lot of pressure to look a certain way, not bald, not gain weight, have a more defined body etc. It feels all these aesthetic pressures apply yet here I was being told men could just grow ugly and nobody cares. I do not want to point fingers, I want to untangle how I felt at that moment.
I feel being queer puts me at odds with these stereotypes, in a way it is expected of me to betray them to act feminine and hold feminine qualities, while within this setting I felt strangely like I had to add the perspective of a “man”. Really doing double-takes here on that definition of myself. I don’t think I am fully comfortable with it.
Ruinology
Ruinology describes the study of ruins. A speculative endeavour that is concerned with open spaces of possibility. Absences define objects as ruins. These absences hold agency
Further, this speculative reconstruction cannot completel abide to a model of factual truth “in terms of a correspondence between claims and objective facts”. Ruinology creates post-truth.
Taphonomy is concerned with investigating the very process of ruination. It can focus on two things:
-either: Investigating the process of taphonomic sedimentation in order to strip away the ruination and end up again at an “original” not-ruined state.
-or: Looking into the history of the ruination in order to find out more about the Umwelt and process itself.
In a queer context, I think it is interesting to read our identities as ruinous. Not in a negative sense only. Our identities are inscribed through outside forces that chafed away at an “original” identity. We are left with traces of who we could have been if we had experienced a certain utopia in growing up (which harkens back to the question of a lack of distinction from other in utopias and an idea of the heterotopias.) As a matter of fact, we did not grow up in utopias, so our characters are shaped by outside forces, leaving traces, technically rendering us ruins. But ruins, as we have heared, hold absences of agency, the things we did not become or are scared to be are to be speculated (fabulated). This can be a process of gaining agency - fabulating the parts of me that broke away, re-contextualises the rest of me.
13/10/2025
It’s monday. I feel like I need a journal session or therapy or maybe both and am still unsure whether interweaving all this life-stuff with my art-stuff is that smart but here we go. You can be my journal in some ways.
Had a rough weekend. But did bake. And did take photos of said baked things.
Here it goes:
Made from basic unleavened dough, salt, water and flour.
The image where the backlight is turned down so much you can see the individual cool and warm LEDs looks like a sci-fi scene from some obscure animation film and I am in love with that aesthetic somehow. It looks at peace, a little quizical but accepting.
Who are they? What do they know?
A similar idea based on aesthetic was to try and put these designs from unleavened dough onto a loaf of sourdough bread. Giving the loaf a face.
Face of loafing.
That also worked surprisingly well. Working with sheets of dough seems to be quite managable and takes on to my will easily.
This time i recreated the house loosly from cardboard to get stencils to use on the unleavened dough again. Worked on the textures slightly and baked them in rounds. Took 3 rounds. The sheets all lifted and warped a bit but it was alright. Then stuck them together with molten sugar aka. caramel because I wanted to keep it edible and somewhat long-lasting - freshness wise.
Decay obviously comes into play here. Especially reading on ruins. There is the natural decay through the material going bad, rotting, other lifeforms taking over the physical makeup of the subject itself.
Another one would be decay from breaking the house, eating it, ingesting it.
The subject of eating is always present with bread. What it means to consume these objects, becoming them, internalising their nutrients as well as their emotional values and inherent metaphors but it can easily feel pretentious to talk about that.
There is a strong sense of world-building happening (another buzz-word I would rather circumnavigate). But looking into the windows of the house through the lens of the camera I cannot help but imagine little figures walking around in it.
I like the play on scale, my imposing figure dismantling the house, ruinining it.
What is the scale of the world I am building, is it variable?
I keep thinking about what this all means, how I am trying to squeeze meaning into it constantly. How there is a need to explain, one I tried getting rid of through focusing on the process rather than the outcomes. At the same time I feel stuck in a meta-narrative loop, a constant back and forth between what I am trying to say (not sure yet) and what I am doing (aimless). If my north star was my intuition, which I believe right now it is, why do I not feel incredibly inspired or exhilarated by what I am doing. I feel a bit flegmatic, like; yes, I now did this - I made a house from bread - and so what? What about it. It feels I am transferring this incessant interrogation of myself onto my practice. Trying to squeeze out rationality rather than accepting non-definition.
But what good does it do to not define, is it not work and texts and narratives that try to inch closer to a fitting description of experience and reality that somehow manage to strike a chord with me? What exhilarates me in other work? Is it precision, or - talking in a meta-narrative again - describing a lack of precision or an impossibility of definition?
In a way this is me prodding at my own practice. And my identity. Through my practice? You see how tight this feedback loop gets? I feel a bit strangulated. I am practicing my practice to interrogate myself, who is central to my practice. There is no breathing room but for the bread I make. The yeast and heat slowly stretching the feedback loop into something that holds content, but the content itself disregarded as a means to an end. I dont know, I am babbling.
I feel interested in the idea of this being a journey, of - again - reframing the process as project. As an exploration of identity through my work along the way, but really it seems what I am interrogating is not the physicality or metaphor or meaning of what I am producing along the way (the objects), but way more detachedly the emotions this creation is envoking for me. Again a very tight feedback loop. One that negates any content maybe. Physical that is.
And also one that is heavily colored by my own state of mind at any given moment. And it is beautiful to not negate this reality of always being in conflict with personal perception and feeling, but embracing it as part of a bigger thing.
And in a way as a queer person if this process brings out my personal emotional journey through means of maybe unimportant tryouts and acts of creation maybe that is the project then? But then I should double down on vulnerability and openness but I don’t know if I can do that in a public sense without abstracting.
What is this creation all about but expressing myself? A need to reach out and explain to an Other how I feel?
I want to talk about reintroducing the bread into social media. This might be a side note, in general I am unsure of the need for social media to be a focal point in this project anymore.
I believe in the autopoeitic possiblility of social media. I believe I construct an image of myself on social media, maybe it is one of the most constructed ones or most conducted ones?
At the same time I think the internet is turning dead. Which is also a common trope of contemporary media discourse. But really the type to portray themselves heavily on social media in a public sense seems to me to be either very classic. As in sticking tightly to a societal standard, furthering a monopolistic view on identity and with it quite restrictive standards on beauty, lifestyle and so on. While on the other hand its the more exaggerated punk attitude to social media, tha relies on an ironic subversion of social media mechanisms and aesthetics.
Either way it is contestable if any broader public really feels affected by social media, especially if their individual identities feel affected.
Another note on this: I do feel looking at individuated experience flattens the whole point. Maybe there is a distinction to be made between the individual and the personal. Let me direct all my ick at the phrasing of the “individual”. It plays together with identitiy politics to describe singular people on a societal scale, it feels to describe exactly the individuals who Foucault talks about when he talks about bio-politics. A sort of phata morgana of solitary actors, a mental image that eradicates any sort of power to assemble and come together to force change. Individual sounds alone, separate, cut off, inactive. Individual feels disembodied, like a concept more than a person.
Personal on the other hand - if i were to define it as the positive opposite - still talks about singular people, but maybe holds enough space in its concept of the word for people to still share relation. To be relational to each other, to share certain experiences and feelings. The personal thus is solitary, but registers their own relationality to others. This has more agency attached and more responsibility. I would hope the personal to be an actor, sentient, uncontrolled.
Maybe this is irrelevant and I’m just typing to feel productive.
Okay wow got side-tracked. So basically bread is this social media hype. Everyone is doing sourdough, I am re-introducing bread into social media but as a work of art somehow, as a personal narrative.
I do get so much validation from posting on instagram about my work. Sometimes it feels like I never took the photo unless it was on my insta story. Which is a bit sad but also fair. I guess there is an internal need to share, to point at things and tell people “I made this”, and maybe on a deeper level “Hey this speaks to me in aesthetic ways or in metaphorical ways, it describes a feeilng somehow, does it translate? Do you feel it?”
Does it translate, do you feel it?
Had a lecture today on perceptions of time and we takled about ritual and mythical time. And how ritual tries to rebuke time, or lift the history from the moment, a kind of attempt to relive the other-worldly experience. An attempt at reaching a higher state, extacy?
It creates a space that is entirely different from everyday reality, to break us free from convention.
We were talking about christian iconography and how they are symbols rather than portraits (trying to make sense of what was actually said there...). So rather than portraials of actual peple, they are placeholders for an extatic experience.
There is an inherent need to reach some “Ursprünglichkeit”, some authenticity that is always present, like a driving force of the universe, call it love, call it a search for meaning, call it divine, god whatever. A believe that keeps us going beyond materialist and rational motivators, one that is totally devoid of earthly meaning. What struck me most about it was the idea that this constant inching closer through ritual can almost never be fulfilled, never reached. Enlightenment, maybe?
The mental image that created was that of the sender and the receiver becoming one and the same thing. All our ways of trying to recreate that, be it iconography, ritual, animistic beliefs of praying to a tree or stone, are just mental metaphors we use to inch closer but at the point of convergence you would realise these were mere noise of translation. And the closer you get, the more noise u resolve the more it all falls apart, and with convergence would follow a wholly new state? A nothingness, timelessness, aphysicality?
Shoot me again sorry what am i even saying.
I guess there is beauty in it is why I am waxing on about it, like leave the analysing to people who know better, but its a similar search for reason as this project somehow. The broader project of creation is one of inching closer to a true expression of self, or emotion or experience that maybe never be able to reach it because feeling is so so subjective.
And maybe realising that we cannot reach it takes away any incentive to try, but i feel like creating images and stories that ooze with emotion, be it small or big ones, is like a drug, I get high off it and I’m almost ashamed to admit to it because it sounds so kitsch. Maybe once the sender becomes the receiver and all tangible representation loses its meaning because we simply are the emotion, are pure in a way releaves creation of its pathos. Maybe that is the key to embrace simple things, embrace trying without ego? Without any preconceptions of how things should look or feel. A thing exhibited at the vencie biennial might not be closer to the “truth” than a stone in a forest or a drawing of a child.
There is freedom to carelessness but it comes with the risk of meaninglessness, although I would hope that to be deception.
I feel like I am milking my brain for thoughts and opinion and even writing it out feels imposterous and scary but there is a little voice thinking maybe it makes sense or people would care or it could resonate. But that feels ego-lead again. I am really terribly strict with myself.