Collapsing Bodies
Performance and Video Work, 2025At the core of the work stands a self-referential mode of spectatorship. The subject gains self-awareness through the superimposed projections of their own being and actions. The voyeur - in this case the camera - concurrently objectifies, conducting the spectacle through its gaze. Both become part of an interplay of observed and observer, the contours of their roles blurring.
The notion of a post-truth reality is transferred into a performative othering of the self, one that is defined through an outside presence. Within our post-truth world, everyone becomes the judge over fact versus fiction and at a certain tipping point, when the hallucinated truth is shared and becomes prevalent enough, everyone falls victim to its logic. No one entity holds power over the shared narrative of an event or identity.
Facts become volatile fabulations that push one egregorian narrative over the other.
Individuals within these narratives lose their autopoetic sovereignty, succumbing to a retelling of their existence that is without their control. This move into the realm of post-truth is further accelerated by AI and networked media systems that allow and reinforce the formation of secluded bubbles. They simply regurgitate existing material to push polarisation and monetise attention.
We become spectators of our own realities, NPCs within a system that is devouring itself through processes enabled by greed and capital. We become products as opposed to actors, not only within digital media, but within our IRL experiences.
The question becomes how to navigate this loss of agency over our own narratives. The work draws on queer references for diverging from uncertain situations, rather than trying to solve them.
Queer writer William S. Burroughs recognised in his life riddled with displacement, violence and drug abuse a constant threat of “possession, in the archaic sense of that word.” This feeling of disembodiment would go so far as to lead him to cut off his finger in 1939 for a lover.
The feeling of possession presumably loomed largest when Burroughs accidentally shot his wife in a game of William Tell in 1951. Burroughs is quoted saying; "I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would never have become a writer but for Joan's death... I live with the constant threat of possession, and a constant need to escape from possession, from Control. So the death of Joan brought me in contact with the invader, the Ugly Spirit, and maneuvered me into a lifelong struggle, in which I have had no choice except to write myself out"
To cope with his reality he turned to cutting up his writing and audio recordings to later recompose them. These techniques of randomisation would afflict new meaning and relieve him of control.
This loss of authorship and embrace of the noise could inspire new modes of functioning within post-truth reality.
In Burroughs' work, loss of agency reveals itself as a productive mode of creation. His archaic possession is sidelined, the egregor slayed, outside control of his person deflected through randomised processes that are self-inflicted yet simultaneously grant himself the opportunity to take a step back and re-evaluate the very fabric of his oppression.