Switchcraft, or kicking the grounds away

For queer people, dressing up is nothing else than covering over one form of vulnerable visibility with another form of spectacle - the clothes are loud, full of joy and chaos, they represent a wild remaking of the surface that both hides the body and remakes it as part of a different universe, a utopian space of play and pleasure. These sculptures follow the same logic; their surface, which is mostly composed of found materials, carries histories of different times and places as well as a situatedness in contemporary pop culture and fashion. By incorporating objects into new relationships, without giving up their previous voice, the situated material illustrates the multiplicity of contingent encounters, temporary partial connections and creates a seemingly living queer organism in the first place. The situated material mutates into something new by being inserted into new contexts, and by being endowed with new attributes. 
The sculptures take uncomfortable objects up into themselves and make them their own. They situate them in a queer context and use their rough qualities against themselves. This practice of appropriating objects into a queer logic and also ridiculing them is something that is totally empowering. I take the things that I get excluded from all the time and own their aesthetic for my own purposes. Ultimately, the material used in these works is treated like a mutating body, a body in transition, a body in change. This transition of material is comparable to that of trans people. Here, too, additional attributes lead to a change of perspective and to a „Gregor Samsa transformation“ - a mutation that puts the body into the right context. 

Externally, the sculptures evoke distant memories, without a doubt due to the fact that many 
recognizable everyday-objects, such as jeans, tools, faux-fur, or chrome steel handles, are incorporated into them.  This state of distant recognition is precisely what I want from these objects; they should touch 
something in the memory, but through the process of embedding, they have transformed. The materials, which are incorporated in the sculptures, all have a specific meaning, so the faux-fur is on the one hand an allusion to the creatures from the book ‚Where The Wild Things Are‘ and on the other hand a code for body hair and dysmorphia among gender-queer people. The chrome steel elements on the other side serve as a kind of anchor; they partially attach these wild things to a corporate, capitalist and especially domesticated aesthetic and let them through that float in an in-between world.

In Maurice Sendak‘s beloved book ‘Where the Wild Things Are, we follow a young and untamed traveler as he learns the difference between the domestic world of the family and the wild world of lost and lonely creatures. This simple story of Max‘s journey maps the potential and the dangers of wildness. 
All at once, wildness appears in the book as a mark of exclusion, a place of exile, and it reveals the violence required to maintain radical separations between here and there, home and away, human and wild thing. Queerness limas ‘Where the Wild Things Are’ and resides within the implicit critique of the family and in the marginalized spaces to which the wild things have been banished. Max‘s status, in his wolf costume, as half boy, half animal - as partially wild, confirms the unsettled arrangement of desire and embodiment that might constitute the precondition for queerness.

„Ultimately in ‘Where the Wild Things Are’ the wild, despite the promise of the title is not a destination, and nor is it an identity. Rather the wild is the un/place where the people who are left outside of domesticity reside - small children, animals, and ruined adults - an anticommunity of wildness.“ - Jack Halberstam

These works build upon these ideas, they illustrate the anticommunity, the lost and lonely creatures, the body that is left outside of domesticity, the grotesque body, the sick body, the bent and the wild body. But just like wildness, they also represent a mode of being that lies outside the systems of classification and simplification. They are not  simply an assemblage of found materials they are not simply sculptures, to say in the words of Paul Preciado: they prefer their condition as monsters. 

“The monster is one who lives in transition. One whose face, body and behaviors cannot yet be 
considered true in a predetermined regime of knowledge and power. I  prefer my monstrosity to your 
heteronormativity” - Paul B. Preciado