MANUAL FOCUS, monsters are not a species

X marks the spot of the unknown, as in more than one science fiction film from the fifties, but it is more properly a chiasmic X, a place of meeting, crossing and reversing, which allows new understandings of the body to emerge.

Monsters or rather the monstrous is the connection that appears when two or more kinds merge, a hybrid (male/female, artificial/real, naked/masked), fusing categories that are usually distinguished, blurring or dislocating expected and conventionalnotions of the body/being. The "male stays male and female female", along with distinctions between what is human, normal, acceptable and what is not, producesdiscourses around the body which stabilize perception. Monstrosity is the production of instability between such definitions.

Manual Focus is turning faces one-80, arms and legs upside down, swapping the front- with the backside of the body. Masks of old men on the back head of three naked women. The identity of the performers is cancelled out and replaced with akind of androgynous cross – X – between male and female signifiers, producing another image of the fe/male body as a desirable object than the one we are use to. The body is undergoing a continuous transformation, allowing various figures to appear but not to solidify as a kind or species. A constant shifting, melting or slippingaway of positions, producing movements of transition in between. Bodies fusing together and becoming part of a larger body, separating again to turn animal,monstrous and blurry.

Manual Focus is a materialization of a concept that allows the monstrosity to be ‘seen’. A showing that in itself is a result of a ‘looking for’; the conditioning of the eye that allows the body to be seen and thought differently.The naked bodies, with the back to the audience lacking the ability to see the viewer, but simultaneously looking out through the "eyes" of the mask offers an uncannyrelation between looking and being looked at for the audience. To focus manually implies a constant sharpening of the vision, readjusting ways of looking, disorganizing conventional modes of perception, always knowing that what we see is nothing more than the sum of a body and a mask.