Hybrid Forms of Furious Flows

What is this ever-returning link between the Trans* body and Monsters, creatures or In-Human creations? Not only have there been many publications, books and Theories about this subject (a very famous one being Paul Preciado’s „Can the Monster Speak“) it is also a sujet that transgendered people face on an everyday basis. How often do we hear things like „Oh why is she dressed so extravagant“ „Why would you do surgeries just to adapt to beauty standards “  or the opposite „Now, that’s not a very girly thing to do“. It seems redundant to even say it, but these comments about our appearance are more than simple claims about our looks. They come from a place of repulse and abjection towards the transgendered Bodie, the Monstrous Body, the created Body. This very constructed colonial abjection of bodies that don‘t fulfil Western heteronormstive codes, has a long painful history and speaks of the way masculinity and femininity have been constructed over the last centuries. This belief of how one  „has to be“ is indoctrinated from a very young age and many people do not want to face the fact that they feel this way towards bodies who extend norms, so they critique whatever it is they can identify as „different“ - we can never just exist without being alienated for the monstrosity they want to see us as.Transgender isn’t an identity term like „woman“ or „man“ that names a gender category within a social system. It is a way of being a man or a woman, or a way of resisting the given definitions of those terms, which is part of why the attribution of unnatural monstrosity remains a characteristic in representations of transgender, what this shows is the anxious, fearful underside of the current cultural fascination with transgenderism. Because transgendered bodies represent the possibility of destabilizing the foundational precondition of ‚fixed genders’. Susan Stryker ‚When Monsters Speak’

In 1994 Susan Stryker wrote that just as the words ‚dyke, fag or queer’ have been reclaimed by lesbians, gay men and anti-assimilationist sexual minorities, words like ‚creature, monster, and unnatural‘ need to be reclaimed by the transgendered. Up until this day, we have not yet achieved to reclaim these terms, and as I just tried to narrow down, still suffer from the way they are being used upon us. The way I approach this series of work is an effort to come a step closer towards owning these terms and rewriting their meaning in a genderqueer context, which still is as important and crucial as it has been for the past decades.In order for this work to refer to the long history of transgender studies, I am using Frankensteins Monster as a subject to identify with, drawing upon the ideas Susan Stryker gave way to in her 1994 essay „My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix“. Because a way to reclaim a term, is to embrace and identify with it, claiming the transformative power of a return from abjection. I, like Susan Stryker, find a deep affinity between myself as a trans feminine and the monster in Mary Shelley‘s Frankenstein. Using Frankenstein‘s monster, a surgically constructed (in)human biotechnological entity — still feels like a clever strategy for referring to a trans Person. Like The Monster, the transgender body is a constructed body. It is the product of medical science. It is living matter being reshaped by synthesized hormones. It is bone ripped apart and put back together in a shape other than that in which it was born. „Transsexual surgeries are about making part of one kind of body look like a part of another kind of body rather than simply breaking a form.“  Susan Stryker  Which is the same approach I have when it comes to using and reshaping existing objects in my sculptural work. The „monster“ which some may consider being created here, is a hybrid synthesis of the essence of the dualism between nature and culture. Being Trans can make you feel like you are thrown outside of the human community. Like the monster, we’re too often perceived as less than fully human due to our embodiment.

Transsexual embodiment, like the embodiment of the monster in Mary Shelley’s novel, places its subject in an unadaptable, queer relationship to Nature - in which it must Our embodiment as transgendered bodies is linked to the industry that produced hormonal and surgical sex reassignment techniques, which is no less pretentious, and no more noble, than Victor Frankenstein. White male doctors still aspire to triumph over nature. The scientific field that produced sex reassignment techniques is inseparable from the pursuit of immortality through the perfection of the body, and the desire to create life itself. The cultural politics behind these aspirations are deeply conservative attempts to stabilize gendered identity in service of the ‚natural’ heterosexual, binary order. „Looking at the term of the Moster that way effectively transforms the experience of being abjected from the human because of one‘s mode of embodiment, into the joyously empowering experience of embodying a new modality of techno-cultural life, predicated on different premises than those that subtend Man.“  Susan Stryker ‚When Monsters Speak’

A central element of my practice is translating transitions into sculptural form. I work with materials that, in everyday use, have clear and defined functions. However, through artistic intervention, I strip them of their original utility and recontextualise them. In their interaction with other materials and through sculptural manipulation, they undergo a radical transformation, a metamorphosis that mirrors the transformative potential of bodies and identities. Each material I use carries its own history and cultural significance, often shaped by normative ideas about gender, function, or social role. By deconstructing and recombining these materials, I carve out an in-between space, one where fragmentation, unfamiliarity, and fluidity become visible. In this way, the sculpture itself becomes a performative element, exploring the possibilities of transformation and challenging fixed notions of body and identity. The process of appropriation and transformation in my work is both an act of empowerment and a means of resistance. By reclaiming objects that were never intended for me (Objects tied to structures, aesthetics, or functions that exist outside of my lived experience as a trans person) I disrupt their original contexts and reposition them within a queer narrative of possibility. This act of recontextualisation mirrors the ways in which queer and trans identities navigate, resist, and reshape imposed societal structures. Within the sculptural framework, these materials take on the qualities of the previously described Monstrous body, constantly shifting, mutating, and refusing to settle into a fixed form. Their deconstruction and reassembly parallel the experience of transition, the work challenges rigid definitions of materiality and embodiment alike.

The sculptures carry the narratives of different times and spaces, from the domesticity of the nuclear family home to the dynamic references of queer contemporary pop culture. In this way, they serve as a living document of transient moments. The mutating, monstrous body is not just a metaphor within my work; it is embedded in the very way the materials behave. Found objects are dismantled, reshaped, and fused together, losing their original context and taking on new, unexpected functions. Their instability echoes the experience of a body that refuses fixed categorisation, that moves between states rather than settling into one. Gender, like the materiality of my sculptures, is not a static entity, it is a process, a negotiation, an ongoing act of becoming. At the core of this transformation is the destabilisation of rigid structures—whether in materials, bodies, or cultural narratives. Transness, as a lived experience and as a conceptual force, disrupts the very foundations upon which traditional identity politics are built. The fear and resistance this provokes are evidence of the cultural anxieties about gender fluidity. My sculptures lean into this monstrosity—not as something to be feared, but as something to be reclaimed. In their hybrid, fragmented, and shifting forms, they expose the deep-seated panic around bodies that refuse coherence, that refuses to be easily named. Just as trans bodies have been misrepresented as aberrations, my sculptures embrace a state of in-betweenness, a space where mutation is not failure but potential. They challenge not only the idea of gender but also the broader structures that attempt to define what is natural, stable, or legible.