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Manifesto
Before the manifesto
I am interested in what happens when we stay.
Stay with a feeling.
Stay with a memory.
Stay with a body.
Stay with a question long enough for it to change.
Much of my practice emerges from returning, to experiences, encounters, and emotional states that do not resolve easily.
Traditional manifestos often define themselves through opposition: what they reject, refuse, or break away from.
This one moves differently.
It is less about what I stand against, and more about what I stay with.
The following text is not a declaration of certainty.
It is a reflection on a practice built through repetition, intensity, encounter, and attention over time.
manifesto
I make art because I cannot not make it.
I stay with what insists
It is an intrinsic impulse.
A pressure to create.
To expel what is inside.
To play.
To express.
To comprehend.
To free what refuses to stay contained.
I return.
I repeat.
I stay.
I dig.
I listen.
I follow what does not leave me alone until it changes form.
At the beginning of a work there is often an overflow.
Something rises from underneath.
Not yet formed.
Not yet language.
Fragments of memory.
Emotions that have not settled.
Experiences that remain active in the body.
Sometimes it arrives without intention.
Something simply insists on appearing.
At other times I search for it deliberately.
I enter a subject, a memory, a wound, a question, and stay with it until it begins to open.
Until something shifts state.
Until something spills.
This process moves between eruption and excavation.
Between control and loss of control.
Between holding and releasing.
Between clarity and chaos.
It is a way of trying to understand the human experience of existing.
The personal and the collective.
The intimate and the social.
What it means to be alive in a body that remembers.
And a mind that cannot fully contain what it carries.
I often work through encounters with others.
Not as illustration.
Not as documentation.
But as lived situations that become material.
A conversation.
A testimony.
A shared space of listening.
Sometimes these encounters are emotionally difficult.
Sometimes they require staying present when it would be easier to withdraw.
I do not approach these situations as representation.
I approach them as transformation.
What changes when something is spoken aloud?
What changes when it is witnessed?
The body is central to this practice.
Not as symbol.
Not as metaphor.
But as site.
Of memory.
Of exposure.
Of conflict.
Of tenderness.
Of resistance.
I return again and again to states of bodily intensity.
To vulnerability as force.
To the edges of what can be held without closing down.
I work across performance, installation, film, sound, and spatial environments.
Not to move between disciplines.
But because no single form is sufficient.
Each work demands its own structure.
Its own language.
Sometimes that language emerges through people.
Sometimes through voices and recordings.
Sometimes through objects, spaces, or absences that begin to act as presence.
Sometimes the work knows something before I do.
My task is to follow it until it becomes visible.
The work is not only made by me.
It is shaped by what it touches.
By what enters it.
By what resists it.
I do not fully control this process.
I follow it.
I stay with it.
I reject production logic.
Speed.
Output.
Efficiency.
Readability.
The demand to already know what something is before it has been allowed to become.
I work in long spans of obsession.
I return.
I repeat.
I stay with the same material until it begins to change.
I fear boredom more than failure.
Failure can still produce movement.
Boredom is stagnation.
I am not interested in comfort.
I am not interested in what is moderate.
I am not interested in what is palatable.
I believe in impact. Impact. Impact.
If something is angry, it should be extreme anger.
If something is quiet, it should be extreme quiet.
I do not believe in “less is more.”
I believe in more is more.
Extremity is not excess for its own sake.
It is a way of reaching depth.
I am interested in what happens when something goes fully into itself.
Love. Horror. Sex. Shame. Beauty. Violence. Vulnerability. The tactile. The physiological.
The emotional.
I want the willingness to go further than comfort allows.
To go under the skin of experience.
I work with intensity.
Not silence.
Not noise.
But the extremity of both.
There are moments where stillness becomes overwhelming.
Where quiet is not absence, but pressure.
There are moments where sound, speech, and image become too full to contain.
I do not privilege one over the other.
I move between them.
I push both toward their limit.
What matters is not volume.
What matters is what becomes unavoidable.
Sometimes that happens in silence.
Sometimes it happens in noise.
Sometimes both at once.
I refuse the soft framing of LGBTQIA+ existence as inspiration.
We are not inspiration.
We are contradiction.
We are instability.
We are survival.
We are persistence.
We are unfinished processes.
My work is not representation.
It is encounter.
It is interruption.
It interrupts expectation.
It interrupts politeness.
It interrupts distance.
It asks what happens when something cannot be observed from safety.
I want audiences to be implicated.
Not as spectators.
But as witnesses.
As participants in a shared condition of being human.
I want work that creates emotional states that exceed explanation.
That transform feeling into space.
Space into encounter.
Encounter into residue.
Something that remains after the work has ended.
Something that follows people out of the room.
Art is not decoration of life.
It is a confrontation with it.
A way of staying with what is difficult long enough for it to transform.
And I am not finished confronting yet.
