Living-Dead Drawing: Genealogy
Iromatik builds on research initiated in Solo/Dance/Authorship (HZT Berlin, 2016–2018): Material for Solometrics, Night of the Living-Dead Drawing, and Sissy Symmetry (2019).
It began with a simple question: How to Trigger my Bodytool?
I treated the body as a tool for producing situations, procedures, traces, and forms of knowledge. Rather than starting from a finished artwork, I started from the conditions that make one possible. The research moved through drawing, performance, printmaking, workshops, creative coding, documentation, and self-imposed procedures. I developed a mock-methodology, XCVZ: Cut, Copy, Paste, Undo, borrowed from computer shortcuts: to document, to commit, to code, to self-organize workshops. I was interested in repetition, transformation, self-organization, and the circulation of material across forms.
Drawing as action was the central site of investigation.
I proposed three temporal modalities of drawing:
- living (the body drawing in real time, dynamic process performed in front of an audience),
- dead (drawing as a fixed record, static residue left behind once the audience has no further access to the process),
- living-dead (generative processes between authored and autonomous moments, a drawing that won't stay dead).
The body was a drawing instrument, and the finger was its smallest unit: a tool for counting, pointing, touching, drawing, erasing, assembling, disrupting. A conceptual object. The digital pointing to the digitus. The finger counts. The finger activates systems. In one performance I wore ten rubber hand-prostheses on each finger, fifty fingers in total, removed because they blocked the drawing. Left standing on the page, they became mini anchors, hands rising from the dead.
The research-performance series brought these concerns together: motion tracking, projected text, identification cards, prosthetic hands, drawing, erasing, sound, lovers, and law fragments entering into relation with one another. A choreography of identification-card gestures structured the live action, inking and erasing traces on the page, rather than illustrating an idea.
The work asked how bodies are measured, classified, documented, and recognized, in dialogue with other body-as-measure practices: Tony Orrico's Penwald Drawings, tracing geometry through arm-span, and Orlan's ORLAN-CORPS, the body itself as a critical standard of measurement.
Sissy Symmetry developed this idea: alone, durational. I used my body as the only tool of measurement. Looped, amplified drawing sounds became symmetrical patterns, repeated until exhaustion became the measure. The question was: where does a drawing end and where does it begin?
In Night of the Living-Dead Drawing, a key material was the German Transsexuals Act (TSG), the law regulating legal gender recognition in Germany at the time. Fragments of the law were projected into the performance space through a DIY tracking system attached to the body. The law became choreography. The law became material, something rewritten, not obeyed.
Questions of identification, validation, recognition, and measurement ran throughout: identification cards, archives, tracking devices, and legal documents, technologies that translate lived experience into categories.
What has changed since 2018 is the Bodytool's shift into Iromatik. Drawing has been a way to study what happens when a body passes through a system, and how experience is transformed in becoming representation. But something doesn't fit.
Today, I call this moment a slip.