Micah Rustichelli Residency Blog 2

I was raised to be fairly fixated on the apocalypse and end of days, and as a result I hold a lot of fear, both of and for the world. There is plenty to be concerned about at the moment, especially between the climate, global crises, and the poorly labelled “cost of living” crisis (which, in my opinion, is just wealth inequality reworded to sound like a blameless universal experience). I explore these topics with humor and grief, through materials of survival, prepping and tactical gear. My work recontextualizes these materials designed for physical protection into new forms, exploring queer gender and intimacy amid increasingly unstable global conditions.

I’ve found tents particularly compelling in their intersectional context, as mobile spaces of temporality, intimacy, shelter, housing. I am interested in the visual language of tents as things that are at times vital, protective, cheeky or leisurely, their relation to protest, war, housing crisis, festivals, queer cruising culture, and so on. The crinkly, shiny materials of nylon, PVC and tarp are so aggressively unnatural that they become anti-natural, barriers that protect the user from the elements, their entire existence defies nature. There’s something dangerous (environmentally and physically) about these materials, they feel, or at least they should feel, completely alien to this world. Thematically in this project, I think I find these plastic, anti-natural materials to be a contemporary equivalent of the forbidden materials given to humans by the angels, which I mentioned in my previous blog. These materials that we have come to rely on are harming us and the world, the punishment for harnessing “forbidden” unnatural materials and processes.

The choice to create wearables is inspired by my own silly interpretation of the following Enochian text:

“And Azazel taught men to make swords, and knives, and shields, and breastplates and made known to them the metals [of the earth] and the art of working them, and bracelets, and ornaments, and the use of antimony, and the beautifying of the eyelids, and all kinds of costly stones, and all colouring tinctures.”

– Enoch 8:1

My somewhat cheeky observation here is Azazel’s teaching of violence and beautification as parallel evils. I find it entertaining to consider that the forbidden knowledge he bestowed to humans are the accessories of both war and drag. There is something in this forbidden beautifying that exists alongside and/or against violence that feels relevant and interesting to me at the moment. 

Songs I’ve had on repeat this week:

• Perverts (album), Ethel Cain
• Whole New World/Pretend World, SOPHIE
• Brexia, Palmistry and Yung Lean
• Xenomorphgirl, Arca
• Aegian Sea, Aphrodite’s Child