A risk is defined as a situation involving exposure to danger. Danger can be as tangible and externalised as oncoming traffic or as subtle and integrated as a familial dynamic that becomes destabilised by a certain behaviour, thus removing the behaviour from your interactions, taking control and removing the risk. Either way risk is always personal to our contexts, personalities, and experiences. In the Christian humanist underpinnings of our Western society, what feels risky can be closely related to shame, and the judgement experienced in youth seems to move into our adult lives, mutating yet unlikely to disappear. Seeing the unseen, hearing the unspoken, makes me think about risk, when we embark on exposure, who has previously not been exposed to the danger, what is at risk and to whom? And who has been at risk whilst these issues have been flourishing in the darkness?

Creeps, crabs & cyborgs wip is an experimental film, that uses performance to camera, theory and found footage to investigate themes of western colonial sci-fi, optimisation, machine unlearning and post-humanist hybrid ontologies. The work is also considering, through its in-between structure – both part and whole - the relation between product marketing and artistic practice. The linear trajectory of the whole product concept is warped by the film’s desire to act as a constant becoming, an idea and fruition, a forever wip (work in progress). The work is part of a personal journey of undoing harmful narratives I have internalised around racial and sexual currency. I’m exploring these themes to make visible and discuss the struggle of systematic oppressions in relation to how we internalise these dominations. Often the critique of anti-Asian and orientalist frameworks are countered through inhabiting the same tools of individual, ego-driven author that build the oppression it is critiquing (Quinn Lester). I want to embrace ideas of infection, contagion and virus, language often associated with anti-Asian narratives, as a site of possibility in a digital world. For me, citation can be a virus, a means of growth and proliferation. I want to make visible my influences and inspirations to resist neo-liberalist desires to contain, market and cut-off community and challenge the lens of the sole creative.

It is also the name and theme of a book collection, curated in collaboration with Anarchafeminist Library, Amsterdam (Anarcha Feminist Group Amsterdam, Amsterdam Netherlands | radar.squat.net ) for their library and my library; which will be used to host a series of events; readings, conversations and book clubs in the future months. Anarchafeminist Library is ran by members of the Anarcha Feminist Group, an anarchist, activist and intersectional community that stands against all forms of exploitation and oppression whilst creating spaces for growth, education and experimentation.

Creeps crabs & cyborgs wip is concerned with an idea of true emotional risk, and how it functions to make yourself genuinely vulnerable in inter-personal relationships as part of the larger political ecosystem. The tenderness in ourselves we feel warrants protection from a perceived threat, can build defensiveness that disrupts open communication. There is validity in this mechanism, whilst simultaneously compressing shame and resisting the attention it needs to change. Whether one (an individual, an institution or society) chooses to expose themselves or not, tides stronger than our protections can take matters into their own hands as issues escalate to a point of critical mass. We’ve seen the power of online social movements like #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter on uncovering violent systems that are long overdue and had no right to exist in the first place. 

I use the subjects of creeps, crabs & cyborgs as devices to navigate in and around of, expanding and rooting socio-political questions from within. Cyborgs: Kyoko, an AI from the film Ex-Machina (2014), made Asian and mute by genius tech bro Nathan; solely for his pleasure pursuits (fucking, dancing and sushi). I consider the intersections of class, ability, race, gender and power, that establish some as subjects and others as technologies for their desires (Franny Choi). With Kyoko, I explore bio-orientalism, tenderness, defensiveness and the desires around constructing hyper-sexual ai’s with the ability to glitch out trauma. Glitching: the glitch (Legacy Russel) moments that are believed to be system failure under our high-productivity capitalist society, being reframed as useful indicators of the broken system itself. “Glitching” as refusal, resistance, and protest. To me, the glitch, is also a way to return to the body, listening to our desires and what feels right. Christina Grammatikopoulou theorises the glitch as the wilderness jn the machine as it defies predictability, the digital wildness of the glitch connects to the failure at the core of being human. Jack Halberstam suggests the glitch has an imaginative capacity as it can't account for time and space, which could become another capitalist mechanism to humanise technology and seem user friendly, but the real power of the glitch is its unpredictability. Crabs: they are used to symbolise protection, privacy and domesticity, their home is a part of them. A hard armour and pinching claws defend tender insides. Vinciane Despret considers how when we look at relations we don’t immediately understand, it’s important to be “becoming with them and (starting) from them”. There is a psychological term called “crab bucket mentality”: the idea that when a singular crab is in a bucket it can somehow climb out to freedom, but when multiple crabs are in there, they will continuously pull each other down and none of them are able to escape. “Don’t be a crab” one might warn. I am wary of this theory; it seems to reveal more about human projections than any animal relations.

In my work I am exploring the difference between risk, vulnerability, and openness, the unseen and unspoken. In an increasingly divisive and polarised political and social setting it can feel impossible to admit fallibility. I have been greatly influenced both personally and artistically by Kai Cheng Thom's Loving Justice Framework, which is a somatic and spiritual lens to encourage grounding, kindness and mindfulness in situations of interpersonal and systemic conflict. The fear of being problematic, judged, shamed or even cancelled is ever present and potentially life-ruining, especially within the cultural sector. I feel the practice of Seeing the unseen, hearing the unspoken as a journey into the uncomfortable, it is about bringing an issue into the light, the confrontation of a shadow self, and acknowledging the existence of that darkness. I believe it can be both an address to insidious, systemic societal ills and a reflection on the self and our position amidst these structures. By zooming out of our own experiences around our vulnerabilities we can observe patterns shaped by hegemonies that uphold our difficulties. This contextualisation can offer a release, a space to feel, process and foster compassion for marginalised groups, which can lead to wider activation and social policy changes created by #MeToo and at the same time trigger fragility, opposition, and fear.

What do we do once we have bore witness? We see the unseen and hear the unspoken, but can we enact loving and transformative justice to really see, to really hear, to evoke real change? I believe the glitch, the unpredictable wilderness in the system can be our entry point. Opening the possibility for imagining and existing otherwise, as we journey into the unknown and uncomfortable, we can be grounded by Kai Cheng Thom’s question: how many truths can we hold in our hearts?