#*transitional not transitory. rip

[meat-loving-meat]

getting to a point in my nuclear weapons AU where I actually need to do some more detailed planning. I can only fly by the seat of my pants for so long 😭

[deilands]

Authenticity in Transition

“Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.” – W.H. Auden

I’ve written a lot over the past month or so. Some of it has been fiery and some of it has been contemplative. Recently I’ve been called to task by someone important to me about a few things. The best way I can summarize these things seems to be wrapped up in the questions of authenticity.  

“Tone: Think of all the ways you strived for being better and more and higher and devout-er as a Christian… you seem to be doing all of those same behaviors, same stilted language. For whom?” –anon

I have this problem. I’ve described it before as transitional fire. Whenever I am moving away from one thing to another or whenever I am changing from someone to someone else I tend to blaze away. I become like the incredible (or not-so-incredible) hulk and I write in language and patterns that suggest anger and rage and disgust.

I can go back to my old journals and blogs and find my transitionary phases. I can find the places when I change from one thing to another – whether by logical choice or by emotional movement – and I can find in those places some of this same fire. Seventeen or so years ago, I was in one of these places. My Christianity was firmly intact and I was for the time angry at what I viewed as the overall hypocrisy of the church. I find it amusing now, looking back, how close I was and how far I was from who I am today.

I will never claim to be a poet – really. Sometimes I write poetry. Most of the time it’s horrible stuff with a rhyme and meter that’s not even remotely fun. In this previous of time, I was expressing myself in blogs and poetry aplenty and I want to post one that got me into trouble back then. It’s not long and it may give proof to what I mean by this transitory problem that I have.

Tattered Dresses - 3/25/2003

All the bells were silent Except the one to toll the funeral Of the murdered Sons of I The bloody corpse of Am The bridesmaid's dresses a tattered remnant Of her casket gleaming brown Never let it be said that she, the bride, While losing breath to putrid kisses Should breathe the rotting stench of life Holding in air of the earth The flower-girl hanging from the tree of life Her dress ripped from her body's smiling face There were ten virgins met by rapists Ended that line bitter quick Taking their oil with slapstick faces While the former asked for more And found their flasks then broken The Maid of Honor against the wall Beauty's dress a remnant of lingerie from prying eyes Can it be said that the steeple Of our churches reveal our nude form While praying piously from the pews of bitter wood We call ourselves the bride of I The lover's call of Am goes forth But we still mend our dress before the marriage Of the man we've engaged then lost to earth When will life return?

See what I mean? I have other stuff that is much more contemplative much like this entry is interspersed with this odd disgust or rage at where perhaps I viewed myself being mere months before. And so I come to the point of this post.

I’m not sure what authenticity looks like. A very dear friend of mine used to say to me that I tend to make excuses for my own feelings. I still find myself doing this. I say how I feel and then I create the reasons that I feel that way instead of letting the feelings simply be what they are. I get hurt or angry or sad or depressed and if it is due to someone else I look for ways to absolve them even while I at times work against them.

This transition for me is different than others. In the past, I always had this concept of Jesus the Christ who wanted things to be right but was looking for mankind to get their shit together. Here – in this place – it’s almost like I’ve realized that it is God who never got his shit together. Worse – he vacated the premises a long time ago. The great I am simply never was. And all of my railing and anger and desire and hope and feeling of chosen-ness was simply my own internal stuff.

I was listening to a podcast today and something was mentioned that did strike home. We don’t suddenly change when we lose faith. We stay the same people. We care the same. We love the same. We value the same things. I still show a lot of angst when it comes to the things that I believe or stop believing in. I still use harsh language while I’m processing because in some ways I’m still convincing myself.

It would be a lie if I said that I don’t pray anymore or don’t somehow get the feeling that there is a grander narrative to my life. Sometimes I still get that feeling like I’m being watched over my shoulder and wonder if I turn around fast enough will I see Him there – divine hiddenness and all. I’m like a smoker who is sticking things in my mouth because of the habit. I grasp onto mystical straws at times because I don’t want to lose the mysticism that formed my entire life.

So to those of you who think that I’m covering my eyes and ears and eyes and not seeing that I’m railing against the things that I say I don’t believe in. . . I see it. And for those who think that all of this is cerebral – it is. . . and it isn’t.

I had to give the eulogy beside the casket of a student once. Draped in his robotics attire and with students and adults alike – his parents and younger brother and all of my team. I didn’t cry. I gave a speech with all of the gravitas that I could muster. I looked at his parents and stayed strong not because I was hiding my emotions but because I process them differently.

God died. Or – my belief in him did. And I’m still writing his eulogy and doing so in front of a crowd of people of my own making. Because it seems fit that I shouldn’t let this thing that made up so much of my life to go without eulogizing it’s worth and worthlessness.

I don’t know if I’m being authentic in my transition or not. I do know that I’m trying. I apologize for those times that I come across as overly angry or snarky or ridiculous. Maybe that’s just processing. Regardless, I don’t ever want to become the person that spends his time hanging onto old relationships that have died.

I hope this brings a bit of clarity to the reader.

Goodnight.  

[house-of-crows]

Finally Processing Last June

You TRAUMATIZED me.

Nearly a year later, and the first time I’ve REALLY let myself grieve... cry about it, mourn, away from the house away from you.... and I’m starting to realize those lingering pulling sensations aren’t love. And it’s not hatred. 

It’s fucking TRAUMA. 

So let’s address it. 

4/24/2019. 

The day I got my T letter and the very first vial. You sat with me in the fucking office of my endocrinologist and watched me shiver and shake and bawl my fucking eyes out because I really wasn’t expecting to get it that day. We both knew it was going to happen, she’d said it was going to happen, but I didn’t LET myself believe it AND YOU FUCKING KNEW WHY.

I told you, again, that day that I was terrified of getting the rug pulled out from under me. I told you, again, on the way to Target, that I thought I was dreaming. I’d been fighting since I came out for this, one way or another. I’d wrestled with myself, and my partners, and the state of Texas. I did everything in my power, and it wasn’t enough, and then I chose moving in with YOU over moving to fucking California, and fuck~ here it finally fucking was. 

5/7/2019. My first shot. Tuesday night. I remember Villains pt 2 was playing. I was shaking, I was panicking, and you gave me the shot. Helped calm me down after, told me how well I did. I wanted to skip work, but I didn’t. 

Two weeks later and you were DEMANDING I go with you to therapy. 

---

6/5/2019 You told me you were having doubts. That you needed time and space to figure things out.  I took off my ring. It didn’t feel right, somehow. I started wearing it on a chain instead... just like you did. ---

6/7/2019 Therapy session. I thought it went ok, but there was doubt. I didn’t know how to combat it. She was asking leading questions, favoring you, making me out to be unreasonable for having touch as my major love language. I think you’d already decided you were completely asexual, and didn’t want to tell me. You kept stumbling around it, saying shit about mirrors and how you didn’t have desire of your own, you just “borrowed your partner’s.”  I didn’t know how to tell you I’d already put the first payment on a ring. how when there’d been light at the end of my transitory tunnel I’d decided I wanted to propose after top surgery when I FINALLY looked like myself... and ask if maybe, just maybe, we could have our commitment on our three year anniversary.  I never got the chance.

---

6/18/2019 The first of many panic attacks to come. I left work early, walked home in the dark. I was aching, and limping, and I barely got home before you did. I hated myself for how my heart yanked when I saw you pull in. 

I still do.

---

6/22/2019 I spent the day on my bike, trying to avoid you. Trying to avoid everyone and everything. I had three major breakdowns on the lake. I didn’t want to go back to Texas without my name change, and I knew I couldn’t stay in Minnesota without a major change. I was stuck, I was trapped, and gods I was so, so fucking scared.... and the one person I thought I would ALWAYS be able to count on was the one shoving me away.

---

6/23/2019 You told me that you thought I’d murder you; “wake up with a knife to my throat” if you’d ever said anything bad about my transition. Told me you “knew it was irrational” but the fear I saw in your eyes fucking BROKE me, again. 

I’d never yelled at you. Never lifted my hand to you. Went out of my way to tell you when I knew I was being angry, or irrational, or afraid... suppressed my wilder emotions, did my best not to be possessive, or needy, or jealous, to let you choose and keep your own friends not to intrude on those spaces so you had things that were YOURS- 

And it wasn’t enough.  It was never enough. I wasn’t enough.  Not good enough for the other half of my soul.... the one I bled poetry for. Ripped open my wounds and eviscerated myself to deal with the trauma and HEAL and it wasn’t fucking enough. Told you things I hadn’t told anyone, so you could really say you had informed consent before getting into a relationship with me.  ...wrote you love songs.

I should have left the first time you laughed. fuck why didn’t i. I don’t know... I think I should have.  I wish I had.

---

6/25/2019 You trapped me in the car on the way home from Mayo. I was in shock. I wasn’t processing any of it.... just that you were breaking up with me FOR GOOD. You made your decision, it was final, and you wanted me gone. It was real, and it was permanent, and you didn’t want to try anything else. That was the first night I slept on the couch. I wished I’d had the strength to do something, anything, to change your mind.

---

6/27/2019 One of my final appointments for my knee injury. I took you out to a nice late lunch/early dinner. I don’t know what fucking possessed me... I wanted to feel NORMAL.

---

6/29/2019 I asked for a reprieve.  Nowhere was open and there was nowhere for me to go that I could afford. Six weeks... just six weeks, to get my papers and try to get out.

If only it had been that easy.

Somewhere, you shoved me into the basement because you didn’t want to look at me anymore. It was like living in a dungeon. Every single time I fell asleep there, on a stack of foam mattress toppers and random bullshit, I remembered that we were going to turn it into our den. Bright colors, soft things, warmth. Family.  I laid in the half-light from those stupid leftover curtains and wished like hell I could actually cry. I just felt numb in a never ending cycle of panic and fear and numb. Somewhere in there, I called the crisis hotline, looking for a way out.... knowing if I stayed, I was going to kill myself.

You fucking broke me.

---

7/1/2019

Met up with C for lunch. Discussed a lot of things, took my mind off you. It was... not good. But it was better.

---

7/3/2019 Another therapy appointment.  I still wonder if she told you to break up with me. Told you “it’s ok, there’s statistics to back you up~” just based on the shit you told me over those weeks. She told me I should have expected this.  She told me that I should have known better than to transition. The therapist you chose said that to my face.... and asked me again if I was sure I wasn’t really a girl.

I see Breakaway at Ed’s, and dance with C and the Realm. We spend time on the river. Something bit me. Less than 36 hours later my entire arm is numb and I can’t feel anything. 

I end up in the ER, and only by the grace of Sammi... because you didn’t want to help, and you didn’t even want to let them use your car at first. I started to hate you, then.

---

7/15/2019 The first “ok” day I’ve had since the breakup and it was speak with C at 3 pipes. Still upset, still angry, struggling to find my peace. 

---

7/17/2019 Queer Dance Party at Ed’s. I feel free, for the first time in too fucking long. I dance with C and Cam, and something finally slots into place. I’m safe, and I have people who care about me. I spend the night being held, safe, and cared for.

---

7/19/2019 You try to give me an ultimatum. I want to hurt you, like I’ve been hurt, but all I do is go back to the basement. It’s easier, but I’m wishing for the safety and comfort of Anywhere But Here. I ask for my rings back. You seem pissed off that I want them... but fuck if I’ll leave that symbol in your hands when you’ve ripped out my heart so many times over the past two months, with not a single sign of remorse.

I call the Realm.  They agree that I can move in.

---

7/23/2019 My first actual rave, and damn it I looked GOOD.

---

7/25/2019 I was breaking. Shattering under the weight of it all. Struggling to get out, trying to find literally ANYWHERE that would accept me for as long as it would take to get my fucking name changed and actually get back to Texas. I tried so fucking hard to find an AirBnB or a hotel that wouldn’t take my entire top surgery fund. It didn’t seem like you cared at all. You just wanted me gone.

I wanted my life back... ANY life back. And if I couldn’t have the old one, damn it I was going to MAKE one.

---

8/15/2019

My hearing. My name change.

It felt like a hollow victory. We were supposed to be celebrating... you looked like you couldn’t wait to get away from me. I wish it had been anyone there but you... your presence mades me sick, now.

---

8/16/2019

I had my labs at Mayo. C took me instead. I was grateful... but I was shaking in the endocrinologist’s office. How did my life go to pieces so fucking quickly? HOW? 

She asked me if I felt safe at home, and I honestly had no answer. 

Where even was home, anyway?

---

8/21/2019 Last day at the old job, and I swore I was going home to Duke.... and then the bitchy roommate moved out, and there was an empty room. It’s decided no, I will go VISIT Duke, and I will be staying right here in Winona.

I spend the night at Ed’s again, and see Ivory James and Anthony Worden and it was everything I needed right then.

---

9/22/2019

Dev comes to pick me up, and we ride on wings of Nahko Bear and Vienna Teng back down to Texas. I even drove a little bit, fancy that~ And I could feel the Morrígan’s wings spread around me... carrying me.

---

9/25-10/2/2019

I am with Duke, and the cats, and I got to see my friends, AND I got a new piercing. I came come to The Realm, spent time with the Goddess, and started rebuilding my sense of self worth, and unpacking a life. Again.

---

The fall was full of more music, more dancing, learning Flow Art, and picking up; and dropping; a few new lovers. Healing myself in the embrace of others who did, actually, want me. And made it VERY CLEAR that they wanted me.

I’m lucky enough that one of them STILL wants me.

---

Winter passed... I went hiking. I delved deeper into my spirituality. and I felt the Wheel turning under and around me. I’m still standing, fuck you.

---

I was part of a drag show. I dyed my hair. I picked up new skills. I celebrated the Solstice. I started a new job. I got health insurance. I put my life back together and I did it on my own two feet and FUCK YOU for trying to make me feel less. 

FUCK YOU for trying to make me feel needy, and over sexual. 

FUCK YOU for trying to make me out to be an abusive asshole for DARING to need my romantic partner in a physical way.

FUCK YOU for trying to make out my kinks to be abusive.

FUCK YOU for trying to imply that I would ever harm someone on purpose for SAYING SOMETHING TO ME.

FUCK YOU for literally every fucking thing you put me through you FUCKING ASSHOLE.

---

Maybe I won’t really heal until I leave Winona.

Maybe I don’t get to do more than exist until then.

But I’m still going to try.

[micaramel]

Artist: Katinka Bock

Venue: Pivô, São Paulo

Exhibition Title: Avalanche

Date: August 31 – November 9, 2019

Click here to view slideshow

Full gallery of images, press release, and link available after the jump.

Images:

Images courtesy of Pivô / Everton Ballardin

Press Release:

Build fire and read the future in smoke Carry out ash and scatter over head Be sure not to look back Attempt the art of metamorphosis Paint face with cinnabar As a sign of grief (W. G. Sebald)

The book Of Cities and Women (Letters to Fawwaz), by Lebanese artist and author Etel Adnan, is a compilation of letters written to Fawwaz, her editor, to whom she had promised an essay on feminism. Instead of fulfilling the task, the artist wrote a series of letters, which were sent from cities as diverse as Berlin, Beirut and Aix-de-Provence. The tone of the texts oscillates between meditation, mediation and immediate responses to situations experienced by the artist herself and the women she met on the way. The content of her accounts stems not only from a sensitive and cosmopolitan gaze, but also from the experience of a body that is invariably open to listening and relating, and that apprehends – or perhaps absorbs through the skin – the intrinsic relationship between certain cities and their inhabitants (in this case, women).

‘She lives in that zone where humanity can dissolve in Nature’, ‘what is the malaise of women in the streets of Marrakesh? In Marrakesh women carry their social status much more than they carry their soul’, ‘I tell myself that we are terrorists, not terrorists in the political or ordinary sense, but because we carry inside our bodies – like explosives – all the deep troubles that befall our countries’, ‘everything about her, and around her was poverty’. Etel Adnan uses her own perceptions while in transit to meditate on the feminine, opting for letters rather than an essay, or perhaps for affective excursions rather than critical argumentation. Her acute prose reveals, without any fuss or over-complexity, the psychosocial and political issues that affect women’s lives in different parts of the world.

These sentences, extracted from Adnan’s letters to Fawwaz, reverberate both in the work and methodology of Katinka Bock. Like Adnan, Bock opts to inhabit, and react to, the context where her exhibitions take place. Avalanche, her first exhibition in South America, is no different.

The German artist visited São Paulo for the first time in September 2018. On this occasion, she explored not only the exhibition space at Pivô but also the service areas and common areas in the commercial and residential zones of the Copan building. The textures and idiosyncrasies of the building complex and the contingencies of its current state of repair (the protection net that breaks loose with the wind, the glass tiles that break off the façade…) were of more interest to the artist than the history or technical and architectonic achievements of Oscar Niemeyer. Since her first visit, the building has played the role of interlocutor rather than object of study. Bock turned her gaze to the city of São Paulo. She collected samples and, with the help of her analogue camera, created images that she calls the ‘periphery of the work’. These photos constitute a sort of diary of the artist’s working process. However, they show no narrative pretension, neither do they aspire to be a chronological record. They are clues, evidences of lived experiences, and also her way of getting in touch with the mechanics of the society in question, in a free search for its constitutive elements and peculiarities.

Katinka Bock’s sculptures and installations stem from encounters and the precise mediation of natural and induced processes. In this exhibition, items as varied as a floor polisher borrowed from the building and two pacová plants bought at the local plant market (Polo norte, polo sul, 2019), aarchitectural fragments crushed by hand (Sand (01046-925), 2019), and an iron radiator brought from Buenos Aires (Warm sculpture BA/SP, 2 019) are turned into sculptures, counterweights and supports for objects cast in bronze and ceramics. Bock’s sculptures carry their origin without raising a banner. They insistently straddle time and its ever-mutable movements, and hold a clear suspicion of everything that is supposedly fixed and irrevocable (her material arrangements are almost always transitory or reversible). Bock often ‘profanes’ the formal exhibition spaces, making it porous through simple operations, such as opening a window in winter or via more ingenious solutions, such as in the installation Fountain for avalanches (2019), in which she creates a route of pipes that transport rainwater inside Pivô and sends it back to the street through a hole in the glass of the exhibition space’s reception. The expectation of heavy rain, or the frustration of dry days, interrupts the lethargy of the objects displayed. These, as well as us — the spectators — are kept waiting for something to happen. In this displacement, Bock also turns time into dense matter.

The effects of natural phenomena are also seen in the work For your eyes only, parte pelo todo I/II/III ( 2019). During her second stay in the city, four months before the exhibition opening, the artist rolled out almost 20 meters of blue fabric on the roof terrace of the Copan building. The material, marked by strong sunlight, rain and dust, and partly ripped by the strong winds, is a record of the time and weather to which it has been exposed to since then. The size and shape of the frame are the artist’s informed choices in response to the tonal variations created by the circumstances. This operation, as well as several other works by Bock, undoes the common opposition between active subject and passive object.

In Horizontal word, Copan, (2019) — perhaps the most radical example of this agency exchange — Bock threw a piece of raw clay wrapped in resistant industrial fabric from a high open terrace at Copan. The impact of the free fall irremediably shaped the matter. The level of energy used to create this work — from the effort of the people who carried the clay up to the negotiations with the building administration and the logistics involved in the transporting it to the exhibition space — impregnates the matter as much as the effects of gravity. The sculpture is the direct product of an event. Its final form depends not only on the care and attention of those transporting it but also on the surface that absorbs the impact of the still-wet clay. The artwork will last as long as the exhibition, as it will be destroyed at the end of the project. Bock leads this piece of clay into a ‘state of art’ only to later return it to the state of organic matter, like an actor coming in and out of a scene without ever losing dignity or the vitality of their presence.

In Lebanon, Etel Adnan wrote: ‘nothing can save us from the sadness we feel. But then, what a bliss when we find a restaurant without noise, when war hasn’t yet broken out in the desert’. Avalanches can be caused by many reasons, from an abrupt climate variation to the weight of a skier. To prevent them is almost impossible. Katinka Bock chose Avalanche as the title of an exhibition in a country where it never snows but which is on the verge of collapse, like so many others. Bock’s artworks remind us that space — or the city — is not a static plane orthogonal to time, but an interlacing of trajectories and phenomena. The artist is interested in the nuances and in the loose ends of narratives under construction, which often materialises in quiet restaurants that host conversations loaded with complicity and connections still to be made.

Fernanda Brenner

Link: Katinka Bock at Pivô

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from Contemporary Art Daily http://bit.ly/33bQ2AS

[exploraexplora]

He fell, but never hit the ground. Instead, she fell through great churning rivers of molten fire and massive waterfalls of ice. Past darkness eternal and through the burning nucleus of newborn stars. She fell, feeling heat and cold, life and death. Down she fell, away from the light she once knew, into an abyss sheltered at the edge of time. Through memories remembered and lifetimes long forgotten, she fell and felt her skin being burned away by the furnace of a ceaseless inferno, felt her bones crumble to ash and freeze in the cold remains of another world. A thousand burning needles pierced her skin, leaving no point untouched, and the weight of a great avalanche slammed into her. She fell…and was ripped unceremoniously back to reality. Her eyes came open slowly. Lately, the transition into the real world seemed to take longer. And that brief transitory moment felt more real. The memory of it was more lasting.

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