ABJECT (2024)

Anticonfessional : ABJECT (2024)

Performance, creation, concept, video editing: Ren Mauney

Sound: Lucy Railton

Videography and Photography: Ebullient Films

Curation: Ant Lobo-Ladd and Ava Procknow

Funding and Residency Support: VAE Raleigh Artist in Residence Program

Premiere: August 30th, 2024

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SYNOPSIS

"This is not a manifesto. Not a one word solution. Not a cathartic experience.

This is a question.
If there was no family, what would we all be to each other?"

ANTICONFESSIONAL: ABJECT is the first in a trilogy of performances investigating confessionalism in the context of the self disciplined citizen. This first performance ABJECT examines this confessional impulse through the concept of abjection, and the role of the family institution in creating a vindictive, obedient citizen.

"Where did you learn that?

To confess, to cleanse, to deject, to rid yourself over and over of what has been tabooed, ostracized, criminalized?

To discipline that confession into a personality

To abject that taboo into an other, a stranger, a criminal, a monster

Dear citizens of the family home

Dear prisoners of the training ground

Dear followers of the cult of obedient so called love

You have always know the truth

The monster is coming from inside the house"

Expanding upon Foucault, Kristeva, and Cossman, this work explores this phenomena of the self disciplined subject and uses a psychopolitical framework to expose the institutions of family and state as correlating forces of carceral power.