Informing Context: Work in Progress Portfolio
This is an online adaptation of the portfolio made within the Sustainable Strategies module as part of my master’s degree in photography, originally published April 2022. PDF-version found here.
“What could be more queer than an atom? And I don’t just mean strange. The very nature of an atom’s being, its very identity, is indeterminacy itself.” (Barad, 2011:136)
“What is meant by understanding gender as impersonation? Does this mean that one puts on a mask or persona, that there is a "one" who precedes that "putting on", who is something other than its gender from the start?” (Butler, 2011:175)
Knowledge is constructed as an embodied experience.
Using lighting and post-processing with connotations to glossy magazines I explore archetypical masculinities by emerging myself as both subject and object in the artistic process. Becoming with false eyelashes, makeup and costume performs gender and raises multiplicities. I wander in the borderland of theatrical performance and gender performativity. The Dudes suite is part of an ongoing inquiry of theories around subjectivity, intra-action, socio-materiality, and dissolution of dichotomies such as nature/culture, knower/known, other/self, natural/artificial, and straight/queer.
Paraphrasing Karen Barad; My performative understanding of the artistic practice does not come from standing at a distance representing. But rather from a direct material engagement with the world. Theorizing, like experimenting, is a material practice - not about intervening (from outside) but about intra-acting from within, and as part of, the phenomena produced. Result, method, interpretation, epistemology, and ontology are not separable considerations.
This is photography as research. And research materializing as photography.
