AGON v2

AGON v2 is the second iteration of a visual essay developed in 2022 and originally published in SKHEMA. It emerged as a complement to the performance 4.48 Psychosis, a co-creation with Maria Torres. Now, this return is stripped of the dense layer of borrowed language that once framed it. The citations are gone and the body is left to carry its own argument.

These photographs reveal they were always more interested in the body’s relationship to its own surfaces than in any textual apparatus I imposed on them. The return is an act of subtraction, an attempt to see what remains when the scaffolding is removed.

The body here witnesses its own states, becoming both subject and object inside the same frame. It folds, hides, and leans against surfaces in positions that are almost protective, almost punitive. Protection from what? The gaze, certainly. But also from the unbearable continuity of being perceived, of being a body that persists. And punitive against whom? Against the self that will not stop feeling, will not stop being available to sensation. In Kane’s play, the question is whether the body can survive the mind that inhabits it. These images do not answer that question. They inhabit it.

There is no stable identity here, only a negotiation between opacity and exposure. The stockings, the gloves, the fabric interposed between skin and lens. Not adornments, but membranes. Attempts to mediate the violence of visibility. When they disappear in the later images, the skin itself becomes the barrier: curved away, folded inward, pressed against walls and sheets as if testing what can be refused. The body stays suspended between invitation and refusal. Muscle, bone, and posture remain.

The light striations across the back in the central triptych mark the body the way time or pressure might. They read as traces of contact with something outside the frame: blinds, fabric, the residue of lying still too long. This is the body as recording surface, registering what has touched it without explanation. The face, when it appears, is turned away or eclipsed. Identification is refused. What remains is weight, fatigue, knees pressed against a mattress, the wrinkles of soles. The evidence of a body that continues to bear itself.

I aimed to obtain images of the threshold where self-preservation and self-erasure become indistinguishable.