This is an online adaptation of the portfolio made within the Sustainable Strategies module as part of my master’s degree in photography, originally published April 2022. PDF-version found here.

“What could be more queer than an atom? And I don’t just mean strange. The very nature of an atom’s being, its very identity, is indeterminacy itself.” (Barad, 2011:136)

“What is meant by understanding gender as impersonation? Does this mean that one puts on a mask or persona, that there is a "one" who precedes that "putting on", who is something other than its gender from the start?” (Butler, 2011:175)

Knowledge is constructed as an embodied experience.

Using lighting and post-processing with connotations to glossy magazines I explore archetypical masculinities by emerging myself as both subject and object in the artistic process. Becoming with false eyelashes, makeup and costume performs gender and raises multiplicities. I wander in the borderland of theatrical performance and gender performativity. The Dudes suite is part of an ongoing inquiry of theories around subjectivity, intra-action, socio-materiality, and dissolution of dichotomies such as nature/culture, knower/known, other/self, natural/artificial, and straight/queer.

Paraphrasing Karen Barad; My performative understanding of the artistic practice does not come from standing at a distance representing. But rather from a direct material engagement with the world. Theorizing, like experimenting, is a material practice - not about intervening (from outside) but about intra-acting from within, and as part of, the phenomena produced. Result, method, interpretation, epistemology, and ontology are not separable considerations.

This is photography as research. And research materializing as photography.