The Hulks Garden

The Hulks Garden operates at the intersection of sculpture and performance, where bodies and machines co-construct a language of transformation. Drawing on theories of gender performativity and queer embodiment, the work approaches hypermasculinity as both a sculptural material and a site of rupture. The sculptural elements function as extensions of the body; prosthetic architectures of labor, desire, and failure. Through this reconfiguration, the project interrogates how objects discipline or even define bodies, and how their mutation might open spaces of ambiguity and resistance. The work thus situates itself within a lineage of queer material practices that challenge the fixity of form, seeking instead a continual re-negotiation of what the body, and the masculine, might become.

The Hulks Garden

2025

Installation view at Kali Gallery Lucerne

The Hulk’s Garden unfolds within a landscape where steel, sweat, and steroids merge into a ritual architecture of hypermasculine display. The gym becomes a cathedral of self-sculpture, a site where bodies are both exalted and trapped in the pursuit of an impossible ideal. Here, masculinity is performed, fractured, and rewritten. As a queer collective, we navigate the tension between rejection and appropriation of hegemonic codes, responding to the contemporary narrative of a supposed “crisis of masculinity.” Across right-wing rhetoric, the discourse on “gender ideology,” and the online Manosphere, masculinity is increasingly framed as a sacred relic to be reclaimed. Our work exposes and reconfigures this myth, creating a performative garden in which new masculinities might take root.

The project questions how masculinity could exist beyond patriarchy, not as a negation or reaction, but as a distinct, autonomous field. Hypermasculinity serves as both material and method: by amplifying its gestures, aesthetics, and rituals, we seek to push it toward collapse. The pose becomes fetish, discipline turns into camp, and the weight of self-assertion folds into excess. Through physical theatre, dance, and fitness vocabularies, we construct an aesthetics of overperformance. We lift, pose, and exhaust ourselves in pursuit of a speculative transformation. What utopia lies in too much? What happens when the image of the “strong man” implodes under its own gravity? Each gesture becomes an inquiry into what constitutes “man” and what occurs when a subtle deviation, such as a bent wrist, unravels an entire system of signification.

The Hulk’s Garden investigates the performativity of masculinity through the lens of bodybuilding. At first glance, the practice seems to project an archetype of hegemonic strength: discipline, control, transcendence. Yet beneath the oiled skin flickers an ambiguity; an erotics of surface, exposure, and theatricality. The bodybuilder reveals the contradictions of masculine representation. His hypertrophied body is both monument and masquerade, a homoerotic spectacle that dissolves the very image it seeks to affirm. We seize upon this moment of excess, the “Hulk-moment,” where hypermasculinity mutates into something other.

Two performers, in dialogue with modular sculptural machines, transform the gym into an arena of desire and absurdity. They train to “find the masculine” and mutate in the process. Figures appear and vanish: an Incel with operatic flair, a motorbike cowboy with crooked legs, a crypto-podcaster selling virility as currency. Their repetitions slip from workout into performance. Bench presses become theatrical postures; pull-ups turn into flirtations; the “morning routine” morphs into tragic farce. Codes of dominance and brotherhood are displaced, reframed through proximity, touch, and exhaustion. Sweat and strain give way to intimacy, as the tension between exertion and tenderness becomes choreography.

The sculptural elements serve as both apparatus and partner. Initially resembling gym machines, or Armour elements the performers can put on their bodies, they are gradually dismantled, scattered, and repurposed, generating shifting spatial constellations. Their resistance and weight shape the performers’ movement language, creating a dialogue between body and object. The gym apparatus, symbol of discipline and transformation, becomes an open structure of play, vulnerability, and failure.

Sound and rhythm act as connective tissue, amplifying or countering physical transformation. Mechanical drones merge with breathing, whispers, and fragments of fragile pop, lending the scene a pulse that oscillates between exertion and ecstasy. This voice (part human, part machine) echoes the performers’ labour, forming an uncanny chorus of body and technology.

The stage is imagined as an arena, with the audience encircling the performers. Observation itself becomes participation. Costumes shift from concealing to revealing, mapping the metamorphosis of the body. Each exercise, each gesture, becomes an emblem for a collapsing archetype. Through exaggeration and repetition, masculine imagery unravels into camp and excess. We explore digital masculinities, 5 am routines, crypto-grinds, looksmaxxing, and faith-based “male revival” aesthetics, translating them into choreographic language. Appropriation through exaggeration remains the guiding principle: to push the image until it fractures and begins to tell another story.

The Hulk’s Garden envisions a space where bodies can unlearn dominance through overperformance, where the myths of virility and strength are exhausted, parodied, and ultimately reclaimed. It imagines a post-patriarchal masculinity, fragile yet fierce, intimate yet performative. A masculinity that grows not from conquest, but from the rubble of its own undoing.