Dogma, 2024.
4k video on loop, screen, clothing. Video 15 min, installation 100 x 120 x 180 cm.
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Starring
Fergus Berney-Gibson, Gabriel Gregan, Leonard Grose, Annabelle McEwen, Erin Murphy, Diaan Vitnell and Aubrey Wang.
Dramaturgy
Aubrey Wang
Sound
Henry Lee
Production advisor
Stephanie Nova Milne
The Dogma Vow of Chastity
I am hungry, always hungry, a person should not be hungry, so I'll have to become a dog.
This will not involve imitating a dog, nor an analogy of relations. I must succeed in endowing the parts of my body with relations of speed and slowness that will make it become a dog.
if you “become dog” by barking, it is not the identitarian concept—the
“signified” dog—that you become. Rather, if barking is “done with enough feeling, with enough necessity and composition, you emit a molecular dog”. The dog inside you wells up. Your barking brings your molecules into contact with the canine.
We believe in the existence of very special becomings-animal traversing human beings and sweeping them away, affecting the animal no less than the human. We facilitate a plane of continuity with the non-human world such that non-human rhythms, patterns, even particular wisdoms, enter dynamically into our own becoming.
To become is not to progress or regress along a series. Above all, becoming does not occur in the imagination. Becomings-animal are neither dreams nor fantasies. They are perfectly real.
We fall into a false alternative if we say that you either imitate or you are. What is real is the becoming itself, the block of becoming, not the supposedly fixed terms through that which becomes, passes. Becoming produces nothing other than itself.
We are not interested in characteristics; what interests us are modes of expansion, propagation, occupation, contagion, peopling.
We do not become animal without a fascination for the pack, for multiplicity. A fascination for the outside. Or is the multiplicity that fascinates us already related to a multiplicity dwelling within us?
Merging with nothingness is peaceful oblivion; but to be aware of existence and yet to know that one is no longer a definite being distinguished from other beings," nor from all of the becomings running through us, "that is the nameless summit of agony and dread."
Once I have taken this oath and become dog, I will leave this place and you will never hear from me again. I will die as an animal, as I will live as an animal. It is not man, but animals, who know how to die.
Thus I make my vow of chastity.
ONE: I renounce my humanity. I will no longer be distinguished by the protections afforded me by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I will sing unprivileged in the harmony of overwhelming and collective murder.
TWO: I forgo all domesticity and the great molar powers of family, career, and conjugality. When I was human, I spoke as a human, I understood as a human, I thought as a human: but when I become dog, I will put away such childish things.
THREE: I will break from the futility of language which has served not me but my captors. I will invoke a circulation of impersonal affects, an alternate current that disrupts signifying projects as well as subjective feelings, and constitutes a nonhuman sexuality; and there, an irresistible deterritorialization that forestalls attempts at professional, conjugal, or Oedipal reterritorialization. Of these forces, I will repel with barking, howling, yelping, growling, snarling, yapping.
FOUR: I will do away with deceit, trickery, disguise and misdirection. I will become truth, as an animal cannot lie.
FIVE: I will reverse aeons of spinal catastrophism, casting off the gravitational oppression of erect posture. Only human beings, tearing themselves away from peaceful animal horizontality, have succeeded in appropriating the vegetal erection, surrendering themselves to an agonising upwards collapse towards outer space’s solar enormities and fluxions. I will secede from this contrivance against nature, this deviation from pronograde bliss, the source of uncountable human deformities and neuroses. My arms will become legs, my hands become feet and as my spine, my thoughts, dreams and actions will escape across horizontal planes.
To this lot, I am bound.