01:36:42
What does love want? This is the question posed in one of Emily Roysdon’s texts. „Is it always discursive or sometimes outside of the rational economies of getting and giving? Queer love is not economical and that is political“. Love as a medium is part of an economy of resistance, ecstatic resistance, provoking questions of memory and tactics.
Emily Roysdon developed a theoretical concept of “ecstatic resistance”, which opens up a discussion on the impossible and the imaginary in politics. “Ecstatic Resistance is a project, practice, partial philosophy and set of strategies. It develops the positionality of the impossible alongside
a call to re-articulate the imaginary. Ecstatic Resistance is about the limits of representation and legibility — the limits of the intelligible, and strategies that undermine hegemonic oppositions. It wants to talk about pleasure in the domain of resistance — sexualizing modern structures in order to centralize instability and plasticity in life, living, and the self. It is about waiting, and the temporality of change. Ecstatic Resistance wants to think about all that is unthinkable and unspeakable in the Eurocentric, phallocentric world order.”*
The exhibition at tranzitdisplay brings together the artist’s work over the last eight years. It documents performances, videos and texts, which represent an attempt to radically reappraise and articulate lived reality. On the basis of the experiences of Emily and her contemporaries, it reflects upon the conditions and contexts of aesthetic production and the possibilities of realizing the impossible. By exposing past impossibilities it develops the “impossible” as realizable and the sole creative act of human subjectivity, which opens up a place for the perception of politics and a new definition thereof. A new imaginary, which defines, denies the hegemony of patriarchal rationality, and articulates the experience of the other. The experience of the imaginary in our bodies without additional linguistic corrections confronts us with the risk of exceeding our knowledge of self.
The last creative act realized shortly prior to the opening of the exhibition is the performance “I am a Helicopter, Camera, Queen”, in whose title are encoded various regimes of the representation of territory and perception, regimes for viewing and methods of understanding the universe. The performance is a manifestation of itself, the creation of queer space, the realization of a new imaginary, the experience of the other.
* in: Emily Roysdon, Ecstatic Resistance
