2024

prologue [structures of unfeeling]


July 12 - September 15 2024 at Helmhaus Zürich
awarded the City of Zürich Art Grant
installation and sound piece
sound by Luc Häflinger

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.”

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. It differs from the mode of dissociation commonly ascribed to sexual trauma in that unfeeling or underperforming results from an agentive refusal to reproduce power, or trauma, or confusion as such. Through the use of colour-negating light from sodium vapour lamps, an extension of the space through a mirrored floor, accompanied by a sound installation and small objects, 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.

from the mud and the slime


INSTAGRAM / EMAIL


Those dying years. It was about language and about what happens when language is uttered. How some things are said with such confidence they almost seem true. How you can adopt a voice to sound at once fraudulent and faithful. Some people use words with such certainty it bears no refute. I’ve never had this relationship to words, always stuck between languages, never grasping one as a tool to be wielded.