i have stood still before a terrain of exteriority so devastated, it feels as if the world has already ended. there are places where silence clings to the smells of rot and decay, what remains (scorched earth, ghosted towns, skeletal structures, poisoned water) whispers the incubation of something annihilative. it is in this enormity of barrenness, in the desert borderland, that something inside begins to break: a despair and a recognition that one is not immune to this dying.
the work mourns death and the impossibility of mourning. it tries to hold what cannot be held: the persistent, agonized and agonizing wail of something mutilated and tortured, the flicker of a face in a frame too gruesome to look at twice. there are images that haunt me, refusing to fade: atrocious realities caught on camera of nonhuman animals torn apart by human hands, pain inflicted for spectacle and dominion. what does it mean to walk through each day with the terror of belonging to the only species one has the option of being?
the work begins with an obsession with communication: not a gentle exchange without consequence, but a painful ecstasy, a maniacal longing to relate with what lies outside. the compulsive desire to open utterly and become-otherwise grows so intensely it flays and hollows the self, disgorging its humanness and unraveling the very boundaries of identity. mania reveals itself not just as affliction but as a voluntary descent into madness, a portal to an escape that is ineluctable, irreversible. a vitalistic annihilation, where the all-too-human subject is offered up to all that corrodes and mutates.
only the tension of radical negativity—anguish, rage, grief, shame—works through the body, where each gesture demands its own cost; and a protracted surrender to exteriorization: the dispersal of the self across sound and breath. the work does not offer comfort. it is a site where bodies and instruments serve only as vessels, spoken through and infiltrated by something other-than-themselves: dislocated sonic textures, the insistent pulse of incantation and repetition, estranged electronic sounds, and field recordings that are residues of ruinous landscapes and ghostly nonhuman presence. there is no refuge, no safe enclosure. what emerges is a space of delirium, a ritual of collapse, where all boundaries are enmeshed: between the human and the other-than-human, the visible and the occluded, the audible and the unspeakable, the self and its undoing.
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Ni
nizheng27(at)gmail(dot)com