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[AMP]
At the instance of considering gender internally and ontologically and then through language and art I am expanded away from my history and the stories I can tell about me. I trash my collections of flowers-accessories, I am running long hair, I speak without thinking, I am exposed but I am still covered up, I am turning the inside out and it is brown and filthy like The Painter whom I may find out one day who he is and what the fuck he wants from me and it is covered in silk and promises of meaning like his paints and the paints he bought me and the amorous passion to which I wasn’t entitled to as a child, to which he was. It is repeated over and over ‘men stand proud’ so show us your chest, oh yes I will, cause I have binded all up and I look out fearless, funny, so disturbingly funny how men are never meant to appear scared, how on earth. So the first thing is you show your chest like a puffed up peacock, I initially find this posture totally irrelevant to me then again it allows me a pride which has always been relevant to me and also it doesn’t take much else, once I am puffed up and look kind of mean kind of seductive there you have it, as if being a man is just about looking tough and guy-like. Whatever, I like the trick and its effects, I can do it, there isn’t much I can do, but I can be and look serious, I am good at that. I am an unapproachable bastard, like, in a way man, being a man, is all about success. Would a failing man, a scared man look feminine? Femininity is proud also, innit, basically the performance of attractiveness, as if a pose can summarize shit. I guess Jens explored this more through The Detective character: what does it look like to struggle and what does it look like to be alone, one like no other one, what does the heart of the gender-freak desire, will they find peace when they find who killed the promises of the glamour of gender as embodied through the disappeared body of the pretty lady-movie starlet?
Something prominent in the residency for me was the first days of deconstruction and undressing of our identities. That was a powerful exercise and after I freaked out and claimed my right to occasionally wear my identity at snippets I missed feeling a non-person. Or maybe these days stand out more in my consciousness because I still held on to a place/stand where I could regard what was taking place from a relative distance that allowed me critical thought because thereon, everything became one. We both got a cold, one after the other, sleeping, waking up, tired, enthusiastic, agreeing and disagreeing with our ideas, feeling comfortable and uncomfortable, it all became one. We, I feel, even started getting used of our guy-ness and having left the girly stuff behind. The discomfort of the first few days was exceptional and exceptionally interesting, yes.
To set the record right: I am queer, so I do have some outlets for the queerness of my gender and sexuality to be played out. Am I privileged cause I don’t have the urge to transition to become a guy that looks like a guy and passes like a guy? Which are the most important privileges to consider regarding this project and would we be offensive if we didn’t consider them. To whom are these to be explained to? To whom am I trying to say what kinda man I am, in which ways etc. To other artists, to other teenagers, to other lovers, to other drag-kings, to the guys sitting next to me in the lapdancing bar, to the lapdancer, to the people reading me as queer on the streets, to my parents, to god, who is the ultimate goal-receiver?
….continued on next post
