Evanescence serves as the starting point of my research on processes of collective identity. The data generated from this scanning of the audience’s faces is treated mathematically, and each profile is saved as an array of two-dimensional coordinates. At the same time, these profiles are being carved by a mechanical arm into a cylinder of clay, where existing portions of the older faces are replaced with new ones. As individuals come together, they undergo a rebirth of sorts, transcending their original identities. The result is an abstract sculpture where no individual profile or feature can be identified.

This process embodies the question posed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari “How do you make yourself a Body without Organs?”. It is an exploration of the moment in which one is freed from their individual features – the organs, which I perceive as the constraints that dictate what is individuality and how we should be defined, as subjects. For the French philosophers, “the organism is not life, it is what imprisons life”. In the context of psychoanalysis, they describe us, our bodies, as organised to comply with a certain set of values, or rules, and the organs are the structure symbolising this configuration. Therefore, we are limited and predefined. By shedding these organs, one is liberated from the societal constraints that dictate behaviour and self-expression. This control over our individuality, as defined by Deleuze, is a modulation, a system that shapes how we can move. It creates a model of what we are supposed to be, one that we need to comply with.

In Evanescence, my goal is to remove these rules and constrains from our identity, enabling us to escape this modulation. I intend to question what remains after melting multiple individuals together, while still keeping the heterogeneity of their identities. Because the process of overlapping the captured profiles is extremely slow, it allowed me to destroy the conventional and defining features of the face, blending the boundaries between individuals. This piece represents a leap from a heterogeneous group of individuals to something else entirely – a multiplicity, where it is impossible to distinguish where one finishes or one starts. I am reconfiguring the original bodies, refolding them according to a new set of values. At the same time, I do not prescribe what these values are. Instead, I let the carving machine and the clay dictate what emerges from this process. There is no governance or control being enforced during the generation of this multiplicity, only the imperfect coalescence of the audience. There is also no predefined model of what this multiplicity should look like. The analogue motion of the mechanical arm and the natural resistance of the clay create unique assemblages of the data, which themselves are irreproducible each time. The features of the original faces are stripped from the clay, leaving us with artefacts around the sculpture that represent the organs removed from the body, which I see as the constraints that dictate the process of individuation.