It is currently monday, tomorrow marks the day of our first crit session post proposal-presentation. What I have done since then is a lot of tryouts. Baked a lot of bread. A miniature house, 2 masks, a face-loaf, a marionette, a narrative triptych and writing-experiments.
Masks - Characters for narrative and performance
Triptych - Narrative inspired by feeling of inexplicability, loss of creative agency
Puppet - Outside control, the human form, classic fool tool
House - Personal history and ruinology
What is new is the dipping into live-streaming the baking endeavours, another installment of process as project, as well as performativity.
What I want to explore more is the eating of the bread. I have not yet ate a lot of it, except for the first tarot card experiments. It is also performative and simultaneously a very convoluted gesture - the fuel of the body, the oroboros devouring itself, cyclicality.
I have the urge to formulate one research question - at the same time there is the urge to just keep going with my intuition. There is a part of me that questions the depth of these tryouts - I make a marionette of bread and then what...
A part of me thinks I am going insane. I started reading William S. Burroughs Naked Lunch the other night when I woke up and couldnt fall back asleep. Its confusing structure and intense attitude really sparked something in me - I feel as though the blatant grotesqueness of the language that was rhythmic but not pretentious in the slightest really struck me. It was so point blank - bleak. Yet absurd and creativeand whimsical.
I want to move away from gentrified notions of queer aesthetic or storytelling - ornamental metals, silicone, latex, tribals, maybe even the digital glitch.
I kind of feel drawn towards a rural queer aesthetic. My queer past was not shaped by urban environments or industrial cities. Not shaped by early intense experience in cities where anything is possible in preceived anonyity. It was shaped in a rural context, one where anonymity was factually impossible, free movement extremely restricted and spaces for free expression basically non-existent. My way out was retrieval into a digital realm.
I was never the type to be subversive or fight for recognition overtly. I would rather stay within the confides of safety and project free expression wherever I could grant myself access to anonymous spaces. It might sound boring but still is relevant. I never had a secret romance with any childhood friend or an embodied way of expressing my queer identity openly. It felt more one-sided, I gathered experience through other people’s lenses, on the internet and books.
If I were to describe what I am picturing, then this rural queer aesthetic would be concerned with nature more than artificiality. The generic queer aesthetic to me feels very much like a scream. Loud and angry. And it has every right to be so, but in a rural context there often is no one to scream it with you or scream at. Subversion is more liminal?
I am thinking of on earth we’re briefly gorgeous. That feels like rural queer identity.
Silent subversion.
There is a part of me that wished I had made more queer experiences growing up, been bolder or less concerned with peoples’ possible reactions etc. But I just was never the rebellious kind (at least not after leaving behind childhood and going into my teens). Rebellion seemed to dangerous an act, what if it went wrong? I do worrie a lot and think my bar for risky behaviour is quite low. I don’t do much risk especially not when I was younger.
There is still this question of granite also. I still like the notion of the material irradiating the landscape, the food and in turn the people.
Maybe it is about representing more variety within queer experience for me? While I think as a main goal that is too empty a statement, it could be part of the motivation.
I wrote these bread-journal-bits and felt really ashamed of them afterwards they seem so melodramatic. I was in a really bad headspace writing them. Apparently queer pain is a reoccuring theme in queer art and aesthetic, and one that stigmatises further. It is important to point at the pain experienced, but there is alos a lot more to that. I do not want my project to make people pity me in a way by (re-)performing pain.
I wonder if there is a way to appropriate rural aesthetics and queer it. Or if there is a lot of queer to be found in rural aesthetics already?
There is this idea that the heteronormative society accepts queerness only when it copies heterosexual values and ideas - e.g. a nuclear family, traditional values, basically recreating a straight relationship as a queer person. I like the idea of actively being more than that. Embracing a notion of queer, that intentionally keeps misalligning until the end.
Maybe I do not feel represented by this urban/gentrified/tech-core/abbrasive queer aesthetic?