this book is an exploration, a confrontation of me with myself > with my many selves (that I have been, and that are still a part of me, living inside of me)
exploration of identity > this book does not have a real beginning, not a real end: it tells the story of a human being > it is constantly evol
ving, ongoing, unfinished, in process, not a finished product
questioning of the social construction of gender and its performativity > I have been playing with and exploring many different gender roles throughout my whole life > questioning the gender binary
it has the format of a personal journal/diary:
writing in journals has been a practice of mine for more than 10 years now
the book format equals for me as a safe space, where I could explore my own story
this small format forces people to take the book into their hands, experience its physicality
it is a very intimate format
people can dive into the material as little or as much as they want > it tells a story in a very non-linear and fragmentary way
collage technique:
non-linear, eclectic
creating multiple layers
tentacular thinking, networks, string-figures (Donna Haraway): creating multiple links
gives the possibility to come back to the material and reevaluate and re-contextualize, looking at it from a new perspective, giving it multiple possible meanings
it is also a very physical technique, which adds to the intimacy of the work
the collage technique is also a materialization of the concept that human beings are fluid, constantly changing, multiple, contradictory, hybrids etc.
„We are masters of code: we re-code / and encode to stay alive. We speak / to one another invisibly and stay / chained to a system of straight / dominance that forces us to / behave like freaks. Our desires
are the ethos of our communities
yet we are forced to express them
in secret. We must misidentify with
the oppressive structures we have
inherited. Burn them down!“
(SPIT! Sodomites, Perverts, Inverts Together!,
The Separatist Manifesto, 2017)