TABOO - TRANSGRESSION - TRANSCENDENCE

For several months this past year, I did my best to care for hundreds of sacrophaga bullata flesh flies in my apartment, and fed them my blood throughout their lives and those of their progeny. These flies are decomposers - they eat and procreate on rotting flesh. I brought them into my home out of an interest in exploring the possibility of ecstatic decay—conceived as the visceral experience of coming undone, post-death, that breaks down the perceived divisions between life and death, subject and world. Setting aside the mind-body dualism of religious ecstasy in favor of a vibrant material entanglement (in the vein of Bennett (2010), Braidotti (2013), and Lykke (2021)), I can locate the transcendence of ecstasy in the body, rather than out of it.
As we lived, died, and decomposed together, I confronted the ways in which the flies challenged my sense of disgust, my preconceptions of contamination and cleanliness. Through my fumbling attempts at care, and the metabolic exchange of my blood, we conjured a queer affiliation, what Mel Chen calls an “improper affinity,” between us (2012). My blood decomposed in them, intimately entangling our bodies, and when I opened the window to let them leave, my DNA got pooped out throughout the environment, decorporealizing me into the world to some extent (Engelhaupt 2016). This strengthens my sense of decay as a site of radical transformation. It also suggests (perhaps even more challengingly) that such self-transcendence is an abjectly gross process - excessive, strange, even repellent. Against our understandings of future ecological change as necessitating a return to ‘pristine’ wilderness or ‘clean’ energy, this work instead suggests leaning into certain forms of kinship with “contamination.” Elaborated through current art-research projects, this artist talk delves further into my ongoing kinship with flies, and the ecstatic possibilities of material decay.