Troublemakers is a performative action accompanied by an audio piece of the same title. Experimenting with institutional protocols of silencing and hygienic erasure, the bathroom tattoo session becomes a space of reclaimed intimacy and collective speculation that subverts these initial violent means into an embodied sense of agency. As a practice of assembly, the in-between spaces of an institution become a space for personal anecdotes to become signs that can collectively be carried and instrumentalized against infrastructures of power. Through a conversation, the artist develops a sign that is then tattooed onto the narrator’s skin. In this way, a personal experience of institutional violence becomes a self-inflicted wound that allows us to seize power over the systems of bureaucratic erasure that we are constantly subjected to. The institution might do everything in its power to remove the human traces from its hallways, but these struggles are embodied experiences that we continue to carry collectively and individually. The audio piece keeps growing as more conversations are recorded, as well as the archive of signs in our bodies.
Sound design by René Andrade Martina
Exhibition view from FLUCHTPUNKT ( ___ ) FACTORY - Here