Bug
What am I researching? I am curious about splits… I mean slips.
I am interested in the conditions under which I can perceive a slip. Why? I experience that a system is real when something goes wrong.
When I look at you trying to get rid of a bug in front of your face, I feel you slipping.
Slips are moments before something becomes recognizable, nameable, or explainable. They happen when reality exceeds the systems used to represent, classify, or organize it.
In Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, a bug falls into a typewriter. One letter changes. Archibald Buttle dies instead of Archibald Tuttle.
My trans-feminist trajectory made me attentive to the limits of categories.
I used to think something was wrong with me. I realized that this feeling only made sense within normative systems that were not built to welcome me, especially those that are supposed to support the excess.
I became a feminist at age seven when I arrived in a shelter in Switzerland and I am officially transsexual for the German authorities. These events generated enough space to reflect on reality, the systems that organize it, and what lives at the edges. I have been fitting in systems that simultaneously support and disintegrate my existence. I keep hearing the Freudian slip, split, instead of slip. I experienced in my flesh when reality exceeds the boxes meant to contain it. That's why I love boxes so much.
I keep searching for a razor-sharp research question while embracing the possibility that the work orbits a paradox: How can what escapes representation become perceptible through representation?