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me in my gut is a continuation of artistic research into the invisibilities of trauma. While what it felt like to dream fire unfolds as an articulation of how an incisive traumatic event extends into and shapes my present and future as well as mundane spaces of the everyday, me in my gut focuses on a more subtle and fleeting form of trauma.
Microaggressions are intangible moments of inhibition, limitation and control of a hetero-patriarchal society. In their inconspicuous nature, they pass quickly and are hard to identify as discrimination or violence. However, those moments take up space in queer bodies.
Co-created with Keegan, me in my gut explores the harsh effect of rigid norms on the soft permeable shapes of queer bodies. What kind of feeling does a fleeting moment of bias invoke in a queer body? What if this moment is part of a long series of returning, fleeting moments?
"The point is what we do with such moments of disorientation, as well as what such moments can do - whether they can offer us the hope of new directions, and whether new directions are reason enough for hope."
Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, p.158
As queer bodies unhinge norms and normative spaces, me in my gut unhinges normative viewing habits. The opacity in the film never reaches a full level, the image always stays just out of reach. The viewer has to strain their eyes to see. When they feel they grasped what they are looking at, it vanishes. The collages merge images in a disorientating vortex that goes deeper and deeper into the gut.
The disoriented aesthetics of me in my gut are a deeply practical aesthetics. The artwork has a unique kind of agency in producing thought and invites the viewer to think alongside it. Instead of 'objectively' judging an artwork, we may lean into its capability of doing philosophical work, of demanding senses and sensations.
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