written by heiko-Thandeka Ncube
„Luciferasian Love“ beholds a strange form like ivy symmetrically stretching over the sterile wall. Blooming unseen fruits of warm light along elastic yet resilient branches. Like a nervous system paired with blown up glowing impulses of resonating sensory organs. Transmitting information along into a spinal system of nerve strings. Or tendons hung up, lacking tension but revealing a cohesive organic structure.
The viewer is left to ponder upon the body of this unusual structure, while plastic cables pose as organic substances and electric light evokes a bioluminescent glow akin to glowing mushrooms or fireflies. The scientifical term of the glowing biological enzyme that causes such a soft natural glow is not coincidentally identical with this works title „Luciferase“.
A title that beholds the name Lucifer referring to the most devious of entities, the devil themself. This linguistic association casts an unsettling notion when paired with the most prominent visual association of the glowing fruits — the female breast. A striking semiotic twist that opens up the paradoxical framework in which the woman’s body and the love she has to give is enchained.
The woman is both worshiped and inhumanly demonized within our patriarchal society. The female lover poses an existential threat to the self-proclaimed powerful man. The devoted mother, a source of pure unconditional love. The self-centered mother, the most evil of beings that walks on our earth. The young woman, the most precious sight soothing desires of lustful men. The aging lonely woman overseen and neglected ultimately left to herself.
power dynamics
at FK-Kollektiv, Berlin
My work is dealing with the dialectic between desire and destruction against the background of an unequal power gap.
The urge to destroy what you desire because it has too much power over you. The destruction of what you desire that cannot be possessed. The destructive encounter of desirable subjects through the objectification of a living body, as well as their sexualization, permeates all layers and levels of patriarchy.
On the other hand desiring what is destructive and referring to aggression as love.
This dynamic unfolds very clearly in myths and contemporary dealings with them:
in the examples of the Scythian warriors (mystified and sexualized as Amazons) who, according to legend, mutilated their daughters' right breasts in order to be able to shoot better with bow and arrow. Next to Agatha of Sicily (St. Agatha), after „The Golden Legend“ a virgin consecrated to God, who rejects the Sicilian governor’s advances whereupon he abducts her to a brothel. The governor sent for her again, argued, threatened, and finally had her imprisoned and tortured. Amongst other forms of torture he had her breasts cut off.
in the examples of the Scythian warriors (mystified and sexualized as Amazons) who, according to legend, mutilated their daughters' right breasts in order to be able to shoot better with bow and arrow. Next to Agatha of Sicily (St. Agatha), after „The Golden Legend“ a virgin consecrated to God, who rejects the Sicilian governor’s advances whereupon he abducts her to a brothel. The governor sent for her again, argued, threatened, and finally had her imprisoned and tortured. Amongst other forms of torture he had her breasts cut off.
Desire and destruction are not so much opposed to each other here as they seem to work together dynamically, perpetuated by internalization and greed for dominance and power.
How can these dynamics of destructive aggression be broken?
"Without an ethic of love shaping the direction of our political vision and our radical aspirations, we are often seduced, in one way or the other, into continued allegiance to systems of domination - imperialism, sexism, racism, classism. [...] The moment we choose to love we begin to move against domination, against oppression. The moment we choose to love we begin to move towards freedom, to act in ways that liberate ourselves and others. That action is the testimony of love as the practice of freedom.“1
The illuminated installation manifests the interplay between attraction and repulsion, aggression and resilience. At the same time, the work conceives the moment of resistance against an unequal power gap.
1 bell hooks in Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations (1994)