prologue [structures of unfeeling]
July 12 - September 15 2024 at Helmhaus Zürich
awarded the City of Zürich Art Grant
installation and three-channel sound piece
sound by Luc Häflinger
listen to a stereo version of the sound HERE
prologue [structures of unfeeling] is a performative installation that aims to find expression for unfeeling and affective incoherence, thereby questioning the legibility of affect itself. In Lauren Berlant’s text, Structures of Unfeeling: Mysterious Skin, Berlant reflects upon the relationship between trauma and underperforming, framing unfeeling as a plausible response to sexual violence, especially in the context of a society that is unlikely to acknowledge the assault or pursue the perpetrator(s). Unfeeling here is not only a response to the violent event itself, but also a way to cope with a world that does not offer support, recognition, or repair in order to deal with that event. More broadly, Berlant coined the term “politicized dissociation”: “…which describes the subject’s exit from prescribed ways to feel about the world, while not knowing how to feel otherwise, yet. This cannot be treated as an individual disorder but has to be acknowledged as a consequence of capitalism and the material affective necessities which are part of life in a wrong world.”
Following unfeeling as an aesthetic language to engage with my own history of childhood sexual abuse, prologue [structures of unfeeling] proposes reticent or recessive performative modes as a means to stage crisis, effective precisely in their illegible or inevident forms. The installation forecloses a coherent relation between reality and the affective response to reality, thereby offering instead the unexpected spaciousness of affective disengagement. Through the use of colour-negating light from sodium vapour lamps, an extension of the space through a mirrored floor, aluminium sculptures engraved with victim-survivor accounts that have been revised to their grammatical denominations, and accompanied by a sound installation, the work attempts to create a space of “flat affect”; a space in which affective incoherence, lowered intensity, and a decrease of legibility aims to offer escape routes from normative ways to feel about the world.
This work is the prologue to the upcoming exhibition and events programme titled Structures of Unfeeling, which will take place in BINZ39 and Tanzhaus in October 2024. Structures of Unfeeling is a performative learning environment that intends to use the exhibition format for the formation of a public culture around sexual trauma. Bringing together a diverse group of practitioners from the fields of contemporary art, education, music, performance, dramaturgy, and academia, many of whom have been subjected to sexualised violence or childhood sexual abuse, Structures of Unfeeling aims to collaboratively find form and voice for the generally unspeakable and unrepresentable nature of trauma.
