This exposition began as an exploration into creative resistance strategies that do not rely on exposure, loudness and nudity. We needed alternatives to visibility as the only way to express needs, injustices and desires, and began a project called Subtle Corporealities (funded by Kone Foundation 2020-2021).
One of us is an Iranian living in New Zealand, and the other is a Finn living in Finland. Here we decided to go all-in with the urge to embrace the monstrosity through which we are perceived, by becoming monsters in our writing and crafting.
Feminist and other critical research have unpacked how monstrous systems of subordination and violence are produced by capitalist-patriarchal-coloniality. We practice our craft beginning from these knowledges but we are not interested in being servants to a language that is not ours. We examine, through our bodies and histories, in an unsettling multiplicity, monstrosity as the politics of
nomad identity
taking the risk of writing and managing that risk by covering
silently and slowly falling
failing to perform femininity,
masculinity,
professionality and discipline.
We envision silence and stillness through materials that are not necessarily compatible.
We are thinking about getting lost and falling as a reclaiming of silence and stillness as political tools. We are exhausted with the idea of freedom (exhausted in a deleuzian sense), and from this exhaustion, we begin to examine potentials. We want to share with you this experience of exhaustion and failure. We do not expect you to go through everything we have to offer. Our monstrosity brings forth an excess that would not be an excess unless we weren't all so exhausted in the culture of scarcity.
Further notes to the reader: This is an elongated and exhausting text, and reading it requires resilience. Therefore through reading and exhausting the text you are contributing to the collective act of resistance. This practice-led article resists the artistic and academic excellence, fluency and proficiency and accordingly takes the risk of failure. Through reading this, you contribute to the act of risk-taking to fall into ... Please take effort to embody the wonderful experience of falling into the unpredictable gaps, slips of tongues and fragments to take the chance of being engaged embodiedly in reading a displaced practice of writing.