Performed April 21st, 2023, at Julian Gallery.

When I was a teenager, I was raped. This performance is directly inspired by this event, yet it is not about me, personally. I think of it as a bridge: connection to others through the multiplicity and universality of living through trauma. At its core, it is about futility—how the futility of experiencing harm is both a comfort and a curse.

There is no safeguard against harm. It can and will happen again; again; continuously. There is true grief in confronting the feeling of inefficacy this evokes.

However, to acknowledge inefficacy and still feel the will to live is not to obscure reality. The philosophical pessimist’s solution of removing oneself from the world is just to wallow, unmoving, in the “bitter odor of corpses” (per Nietzsche).

On the other hand, to never consider this despair may result in self-deception, or at least a dishonest (and therefore less helpful) mode of critique. Having felt inert in my trauma for so long, I want to both see/feel it and breathe movement into it, engage actively. In the face of the abyss, why not throw roses into it?

There is a point at which despair and relief, curse and comfort, the Dionysian and the Apollonian, meet. The roses are cast again; again; continuously. Hope is a practice. It’s at this cusp I want this piece, and myself, to live.