prologue [structures of unfeeling]
installation and three-channel sound piece
July - September 2024 at Helmhaus Zürich (CH)
November 2024 - January 2025 at Museum der Moderne Salzburg (AT)
listen to a stereo version of the sound piece HERE
Sound by Luc Häflinger
prologue [structures of unfeeling] is a performative installation that aims to find expression for unfeeling and affective incoherence, thereby questioning the legibility of affect itself. In Lauren Berlant’s text, Structures of Unfeeling: Mysterious Skin, Berlant reflects upon the relationship between trauma and underperforming, framing unfeeling as a plausible response to sexual violence, especially in the context of a society that is unlikely to acknowledge the assault or pursue the perpetrator(s). Unfeeling here is not only a response to the violent event itself, but also a way to cope with a world that does not offer support, recognition, or repair in order to deal with that event. More broadly, Berlant coined the term “politicized dissociation”: “…which describes the subject’s exit from prescribed ways to feel about the world, while not knowing how to feel otherwise, yet. This cannot be treated as an individual disorder but has to be acknowledged as a consequence of capitalism and the material affective necessities which are part of life in a wrong world.”
Following unfeeling as an aesthetic language to engage with experiences of sexualised violence, prologue [structures of unfeeling] proposes reticent or recessive performative modes as a means to stage crisis, effective precisely in their illegible or inevident forms. The installation forecloses a coherent relation between reality and the affective response to reality, thereby offering instead the unexpected spaciousness of affective disengagement. Through the use of colour-negating light from sodium vapour lamps, an extension of the space through a mirrored floor, aluminium sculptures engraved with victim-survivor accounts that have been revised to their grammatical denominations, and accompanied by a sound installation, the work attempts to create a space of “flat affect”; a space in which affective incoherence, lowered intensity, and a decrease of legibility aims to offer escape routes from normative ways to feel about the world.
Following unfeeling as an aesthetic language to engage with experiences of sexualised violence, prologue [structures of unfeeling] proposes reticent or recessive performative modes as a means to stage crisis, effective precisely in their illegible or inevident forms. The installation forecloses a coherent relation between reality and the affective response to reality, thereby offering instead the unexpected spaciousness of affective disengagement. Through the use of colour-negating light from sodium vapour lamps, an extension of the space through a mirrored floor, aluminium sculptures engraved with victim-survivor accounts that have been revised to their grammatical denominations, and accompanied by a sound installation, the work attempts to create a space of “flat affect”; a space in which affective incoherence, lowered intensity, and a decrease of legibility aims to offer escape routes from normative ways to feel about the world.
