PLAYGROUND OF TABOO 2025
Modern society, in its overemphasis on rational order, has left itself exposed to emotional and violent impulses. This reveals the inherent contradictions of civilization, where repressed instincts eventually erupt in other forms, exposing fractures within the system itself. This work explores the suppressed desires of individuals in a moralized society particularly instincts of savagery and destruction
Through performance film, I reject the socially constructed notion of the “appropriate body.” I cover myself in mud, lie flat on the ground, sweat, and move my body with sometimes violent intensity. In these actions, desire is not aestheticized but rather experienced as physical resistance and sensory pleasure painful, unpleasant, yet strangely gratifying
The movements we perform in daily life are not entirely voluntary. Objects around us by their very design predefine how we are to act, forming a subtle mode of control. A chair dictates how we should sit, clothes restrict the range of movement, and social norms guide the ideal shape of a body
Desire, too, is shaped by power, and yet it functions as a way of resisting that very power. As Foucault argued in The History of Sexuality, prohibition does not simply suppress it produces new forms of desire. We take pleasure in breaking taboos, but even that pleasure operates within the very scenario constructed by those taboos
I am less interested in destruction itself than in the swelling of sensation just before destruction the structure of feeling it generates. This is not about staining for the sake of collapse, but rather about sensing the boundaries of the self through defilement. In dirtying the body, in shaking its limits, desire is made to flow bringing the id and superego into a direct and physical collision
Through performance film, I reject the socially constructed notion of the “appropriate body.” I cover myself in mud, lie flat on the ground, sweat, and move my body with sometimes violent intensity. In these actions, desire is not aestheticized but rather experienced as physical resistance and sensory pleasure painful, unpleasant, yet strangely gratifying
The movements we perform in daily life are not entirely voluntary. Objects around us by their very design predefine how we are to act, forming a subtle mode of control. A chair dictates how we should sit, clothes restrict the range of movement, and social norms guide the ideal shape of a body
Desire, too, is shaped by power, and yet it functions as a way of resisting that very power. As Foucault argued in The History of Sexuality, prohibition does not simply suppress it produces new forms of desire. We take pleasure in breaking taboos, but even that pleasure operates within the very scenario constructed by those taboos
I am less interested in destruction itself than in the swelling of sensation just before destruction the structure of feeling it generates. This is not about staining for the sake of collapse, but rather about sensing the boundaries of the self through defilement. In dirtying the body, in shaking its limits, desire is made to flow bringing the id and superego into a direct and physical collision
BACKFLOW 2026
BACKFLOW does not seek to represent the collapse of boundaries, but to explore the conditions under which such a collapse can occur. It unsettles the boundaries between inside and outside, human and non-human, order and contamination, repression and desire, revealing the moment when what has been excluded returns and flows back inward
We continually construct boundaries to regulate impulse, pushing certain things beyond them. Yet what has been excluded does not disappear completely. Residue, contamination, and decay return, unsettling the distinction between inside and outside. Backflow is the moment when the order of exclusion crosses the very boundaries it has created
The mechanisms designed to maintain order can, paradoxically, produce the impulse to transgress it. Taboo suppresses desire while simultaneously intensifying it; boundaries protect the subject while also generating the force that seeks to exceed them
Experiences such as sacrifice, death, and ecstasy reveal this temporary collapse of boundaries in its most extreme form. When the self can no longer fully control itself, the subject encounters the desires it has repressed and excluded
In losing the self, one experiences oneself
BACKFLOW looks toward this paradoxical moment: when the boundaries created to repress instinct collapse, what has been pushed away returns, and forbidden impulses rise to the surface. It is there that the subject confronts what it has had to exclude in order to exist
And in that very moment, desire breathes most intensely
ITELMEE 2026
CREATIVE DIRECTION / STYLING _ FRANCAROSNER
ART DIRECTION _ ASPYN
PHOTO _ VILEDRESS
SCULPTURE _ RUBY CHEN
ART DIRECTION _ ASPYN
PHOTO _ VILEDRESS
SCULPTURE _ RUBY CHEN