Passage: Pas sage
Je m'intéresse aux passages pas sages. I'm interested in passages that don't behave predictably.
1. I can't stop noticing passages. Particularly the slippery ones.
I'm drawn to situations where a body enters medicine, a gesture becomes data, an experience becomes language, a person becomes an administrative record, or perception becomes drawing. These are different systems but they trigger the same question. By system, I mean a rule-based space that makes some things possible while constraining others, changing (or not) what passes through it. In everyday life, I get excited when I stand in a doorway. Thresholds catch my attention. What does passing through a system do to what passes through it?
A body entering medicine is the most personal: my own transition. Trans experience, for me, is not context but method.
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2. I suspect passages are transformative.
My intuition is that nothing passes through a system unchanged.
I tested this in performance: a law projected onto my body, rewritten by being performed, not obeyed.
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Living-Dead Drawing: Genealogy
3. I don't want to prove my intuition. I want to test it.
My intuition is shaped by the way I perceive the world (partly inverted, guided by a suspectrum-gaydar aka neuroqueer). It makes me notice passages everywhere. I wonder if passages are actually transformative, or if I simply perceive them that way. This is precisely what I want to investigate. What changes during a passage? What is lost? What is invented? What stays the same?
How can what escapes representation become perceptible through representation?
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4. I build situations to study passages.
My practice consists of building experimental situations that slow passages down or amplify them, so that I can observe and compare them.
Iromatik is one of those situations.
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5. A slip is the moment when a passage becomes perceptible.
It is not the transformation itself. It is the moment something passing through a system does not fully obey it. That mismatch is what I become aware of. Slips allow me to study passages because they make visible what is usually unnoticed.
During the discussion with A studying dynamical systems, I learned that some systems keep the same kind of thing on both sides: a point goes in, a point comes out. Other systems change the kind of thing entirely, in my own work: a gesture goes in, an image comes out. A slip might be the moment a system you expected to be the first kind turns out to be the second, when you thought its nature would stay the same, and it didn't.