I just came back from my weekend in lower austria. Went to my parents to set up their new computer and gather material for my project.
It was a 4 day whirlwind just constantly doing stuff and ticking things off.
Baked a bread-fish.
Baked a mask.
Basked some smaller accessories from bread.
Performed in the forest.
Filmed the Carp being ripped apart by everyone working at the restaurant.
Filmed the mask being nibbled at by carp.
Recorded a stream.
Recorded the old people at the restaurant.
What did I learn from doing this?
I am not sure I am commited to the bit? Or if the bit is what I am making it out to be.
It feels there is a fork in the road, where I decide to either go for a meta-narrative of making this project, or I make a project film - one that stays fully within the universe I am building. Or maybe there is an in-between.
I think once again I should be careful to see things so black and white. Probabyl there is a middle ground. All of my actions feel like snapshots. The performance in the forest and the holding of the carp in the sink were more moments than actions. There was no goal or story. Just scene-setting. Which is fine and fair already. But I think there would have to be something more to it.
Also filming and gathering all this stuff I feel as though a movie will happen, but I want to keep reminding myself that that is not the only possible medium. It feels like the most comfortable one but even that I am not sure of - I am not really an expert in filming or recording.
I still think something installation or performance based would be super nice. Also the idea of a performance lecture still strikes me as interesting, but it feels a bit like a trendy thing to do right now.
I started reading the bread and puppet theatre books and it talked about it being presentational theatre rather than representational theatre. The idea being that you do not embody something else but u stay yourself and present the audience with something - you become a mere mediator. And it talked about that being tied to a necessary release of the ego. Which I think is a nice thought.
Refusal of definitive Identity.
If my starting point was: How do I keep agency over my personal narrative? Then maybe re-invention could be the answer. Refusing definition. Demonstrating again and again that I am in control over myself. But that also sounds tiring.
It was interesting to me, how I underestimate the people who I grew up with. My mom helped me record and took photos and videos. And while she did all this quite well, what struck me most was her determination. How she is utterly unstoppable and motivated. And seizes any and every opportunity. I think I am quite good at following hunches and ideas without getting stuck with second guessing, but her ability to just go for it is truly astounding.
I also see in her a certain lack of attention to detail, that I observe in myself on the regular , which can be frustrating.
My dad was not actively supporting, proactively pushing me to do anything, but happily obliged, watches what I did and wanted to see. Which is already more than I expected.
People are down to do weird stuff for people they trust and love and I suppose I know a great bunch of people on the countryside who trust and love me.
On the flip side, I think abstraction works as a shield to hide behind at times. It stresesd me out quite a bit when other people got involved, people I didn’t know too much to help me find some carp. And I would never explain what it was for or what it meant to me. I would say things like researching my past and cultural inheritance, my roots... But never really mention the queer aspects.
For fear? I get nervous talking about the intentions of these things in front of people from my hometown, people I feel somewhat close to. People who do not know I am queer - at least not officially.
I would circumscribe the elephant in the room somehow.
In some ways I feel like this project is forcing me to take my identity back with me to my home and rekindle hope there. Like patching up past wounds. Its not a grand outcome maybe but a learning process? Always. Like identity.
12 - Butterflies
You ask me why I started therapy. This is coming from a place of fear. I honestly don't fully know at this point. I guess every week I set a new appointment is another decision to do it.
I tell you about my sex life. I would never have before, but somehow it feels so unimportant that it doesn't matter much.
I close off to people. I am scared of being vulnerable, unprepared, at an obvious loss. One on one, I cannot disguise my confusion behind silence or avoiding actions. When there is only one person and you share one moment, there is nothing that could be moved into the realm of secrecy.
Deflection becomes the only obvious fault.
I can't have sex, that is why I started therapy. Saying this I thought would feel like a damn breaking open but it felt more like a ruin crumbling away in an empty forest.
I spill the words empty out of myself. Spill is the wrong word, I place them in front of me in a compulsively sterile fashion. They don't come out as a wet, steamy pudge, but more like dry shortbread. I present the facts beside myself, like a vendor at a market. Selling this version of a thing that had a life in a different space, a different time.
We don't talk about this ever.
The first and last time I talked to you honestly about love was the first time I felt this bond of blood could be broken. I felt it break. Saw it break. Saw it break in the way you looked at me in silence. This came from a place of fear as well. Projected itself as hate or utter surrender.
Since then no one dared to check, if the band had healed. Bringing it up might break it again. Like a limb stuck in some gruesome machine, better to abandon. Moving the cog of wheels either way would lead to more useless destruction and pain.
I am turning 24 now and think I have realized that coming out never set me free at all. It removed a veil of ambiguity to shine the spotlight on a part of myself that I then learned to shield entirely from you.
Coming out was more like going back in deeper, to you at least.
Years passed and any mention of love was done in a haste. My mind preoccupied with your reaction to the simple fact that I am queer rather than with the query at hand.
Haste. Like pushing a rickety cart filled with valuable and vulnerable contents over a cobbled street. Everybody will only be concerned about the condition of the cart rather than its contents. It's not about the contents of the cart, or who pushed it, the state of the cart is the only subject of concern.
You tell me it should feel like I had butterflies in my stomach. That's how you know.
You tell me it should feel like I had butterflies in my stomach. That's how you know.
I want to cry. I want to hold you for saying that.
I can't shake the feeling you should have shared that wisdom with me 8 years ago.
I idolize you, and I don't know if thats fair to either of us.
There is no pretext or stage set for it to ever come up.
I don't know if others talk about it.
Had we talked about it 8 years ago, would I be able to accept vulnerability into my life? I am not looking for a scapegoat. I want to say it is nobody's fault. Thats something I say a lot, you could maybe even pathologize me saying that.
But what I think is, it's dad's fault - but then I inevitably think no, he is a victim as well. He might be passing it on. And sure enough, soon enough everyone is a victim and it becomes political. I can't have sex because we are all the world's victims? Thats a debate lost.
You have to feel butterflies in your stomach. Uttered by a 6-year-old that makes sense. Uttered by my mother it becomes more than that. It's not a set phrase - I'd like to believe - but lived experience boiled down to the purest, simplest, dumbest truth.
Like living, loving and experiencing 55 years on this planet leaves you with just as much wisdom as any 6-year-old. In a way that is beauty that I'd like to believe.
"I know everything" is what you would say to shut down that nagging 6-year-old. And 18 years later I am trying to hold onto that being the truth for my life, but every now and then it seems - unlike the butterfly-thing - like something you had just said, made up.
And I am making it up, with less credibility, but maybe we are granted credibility through responsibility at a later point?
You have to feel butterflies in your stomach. Bake a mud-cake. Raise a child. Butterflies.
Who took that away from us? Who took my butterflies?
Time is abhorrently rude. Indifferent to silence.
I would like to think you wanted to tell me that every minute of our lives. And you did and still do in everything you do, your actions scream "BUTTERFLIES!"
Every one of your actions set in motion by butterflies. That is what you want me to do as well. Live life for the butterflies. Anything else you can disregard. And it will hurt sometimes to disregard. Hurt yourself and others by delineating from an idea that the collective conscious has built around you but that is fine. As long as the butterflies keep tickling on your inside you will be alright.
I imagine us still back in that car. What if we never went home. What if we had stayed in that car forever talking about butterflies. In pain and joy. In broken dreams and the beautiful work that is re-piecing them together as a wholly new mosaic?
What would have been?
13/11/2025
And so naturally, I went back to my hometown where I guess my identity started to take shape.
But things didn’t really work as planned.
The whole process was about stripping away parts that felt artificial to my identity. And I feel like within the project it revealed a lot of arbitrariness. (Also concerning what pretences I have built up around my practice, the things I share or do not share, how i share them etc.)
The parts of it that were planned to be a performance obviously felt very sterile and pretentious. It almost felt like the parts I actually wanted to convey were more present in everything that happened around it. And the way the project was unfolding itself more than in the perceived outcome of it. (My role and identity with regards to this space are evident In the way I navigate it more directly than through representational gestures.)
I didn’t really tell anyone when filming that this was about queer identity within a rural environment because I didn’t dare to. Because I was scared. So somehow still performing these aesthetics made it more obvious that I had to talk about it. (I would tell people about what I was doing but carefully avoid talking about sexuality. Somehow, I think the creative process - setting these abstract scenes and performing - isinherently queer or at least far outside of the ordinary, rural experience. Whether that means I am hiding behind my practice as a means of valitdating my outlier position or whether that means I do not need to share my identity directly, I do not know.)
There’s this notion in ruinology that ruins can be seen as sites of more information for all of the physical traits that they’ve lost over time, and the environment that has imprinted themselves on them.
So rather than seeing your past as something that has ruined you, you can see the damaged parts as places for a newfound agency. (Through making up what is missing, fabulating a wholly different context for the whole.)
It’s these voices that have shaped the perception that I think people have of myself, and that I then in turn, acquired for myself.
And I guess it’s in a way hard to create more wiggle room for who you could be. (I think my point here is that this wiggle room is not something people will hand to you, but something u need to first find within yourself.)
(I tend to think in black and white. )
But in a way it’s always going to have some aspects of failure, productive failure potentially. (Wiggling)
What always struck me about the countryside was the willingness of people to help each other, and how anything could be achieved within a few phone calls. And everybody would be down to help. But there’s always this preconceived notion of people seeing me as a burden or as an imposter to their environment. And in a way, I think a lot of that is what I am projecting onto them. And in turn, removing agency from themselves to act and react to me being there. (Premediating their reactions and in turn adapting my behaviour.)
Potentially, this sounds like a lot of undue praise, because I know that a lot of insult and that [kind of] shit has shaped my identity there as well.
But maybe I can be more hopeful?
And so naturally, I went back to my hometown where I guess my identity started to take shape.
But things didn’t really work as planned.
Logically to arrive at some objective truth I thought I would start stripping away parts of myself that felt artificial. And I feel like within the project that revealed a lot of arbitrariness. (Also concerning what pretences I have built up around my practice, the things I share or do not share, how i share them etc.)
Soon I found myself wondering if anything would be left in the end.
When I performed it felt very sterile and pretentious. Almost like the parts I actually wanted to convey were more present in everything that happened around it. And the way the project was unfolding itself more than in any supposed outcome. (My role and identity with regards to this space are evident In the way I navigate it more directly than through representational gestures.)
I didn’t really tell anyone when filming that this was about queer identity within a rural environment because I didn’t dare to. Because I was scared. (I would tell people about what I was doing but carefully avoid talking about sexuality. Somehow, I think the creative process - setting these abstract scenes and performing - is inherently queer or at least far outside of the ordinary, rural experience. Whether that means I am hiding behind my practice and using it as a means of valitdating my outlier position or whether that means there is no obligation for me to share my identity directly, I do not know.)
There’s this notion in ruinology that ruins can be seen as sites of more information for all of the physical traits that they’ve lost over time, and the environment that has imprinted themselves on them. So rather than seeing your past as something that has ruined you, you can see the damaged parts as places for a newfound agency. (Through making up what is missing, fabulating a wholly different context for the whole.)
It’s these voices that have shaped the perception that I think people have of myself, and that I then in turn, acquired for myself.
And I guess it’s in a way hard to create more wiggle room for who you could be. (I think my point here is that this wiggle room is not something people will hand to you, but something u need to first find within yourself.)
(I tend to think in black and white. )
But in a way it’s always going to have some aspects of failure, productive failure potentially. (Wiggling)
What always struck me about the countryside was the willingness of people to help each other, and how anything could be achieved within a few phone calls. And everybody would be down to help. But there’s always this preconceived notion of people seeing me as a burden or as an imposter to their environment. And in a way, I think a lot of that is what I am projecting onto them. *(Premediating their reactions and in turn adapting my behaviour.)
Potentially, this sounds like a lot of undue praise, because I know that a lot of insult and that [kind of] shit has shaped my identity there as well.
But maybe I can be more hopeful?