GOLDSMITHS | BA Fine Art 2020

Juan David Serna Orozco



False Delirium
2020
Performance and text

Intro

I know the diagnosis. I’ve been to the doctor this week and he recommended Structure. I broke down at realising I shifted in paradigms of good and evil all in service for someone that cared little for a gesture of their transcendence and only wanted understanding of one or the other.

Delirium

It came in capsules, glowing oil with a transparent surface. I noticed the Sun shining through the windows of the room and I felt I had enough already.

He could see in my face it was too much, but also understood that some mg more wouldn’t do me bad, instead it would set me right.

He checked my breath and then said air was malleable, that co2 wasn’t any kind of violence. The foetus in me rolled up into a ball and for once in such a long time I felt the Other world coming at for my world.

His coffee rippled. Intuitively I knew that somewhere in the universe two neutron stars had just collided. Something was ending.

I felt I finally could empathise with him, I wasn’t sure if it was him or the painting of a demon behind his back, but I repeated I trusted the process and that I would commit to the process. He repeated over and over the precautions I had to take if faced with an experience of derangement.

It was weird the way nature learnt my fears and provided solution to them. Nevertheless the process was everything, and something was beginning.

I

I swallowed down the first capsule.

Suddenly, all came to reflect my touch. The glass rippled as much as the water did, and the lines of the building mimicked the graphs of biological cells.

I remember year 3 and learning the process of cells; they are meant to work as a fabric, a big corporation that their ultimate function is the life of the animal body.

It sounded like a conspiracy. Was I in a cell? Which part was I? And would the body of the earth see me the way I am able to see the cells of my body?

I remember the doctor said one of the secondary effects was an inverted gaze; “those of satellites” he said,

“looking outside when actually they are gazing inside” he looked at me “It eventually results in a feeling of deep void.” He continued.

I wasn’t sure whether I was actually experiencing such effect, however I felt tempted to take a second pill since I felt there was something missing. I stopped myself from doing it. I trusted the process and remained calm at realising I could look through the glass and still be in a safe space, untouched and pure.

(inside the placebo)

The sense of harmony seemed landed from the heavens, it wasn’t a revelation; light just knew how to make it through spaces and show a real presence, I thought. It was more like a sense of being thankful for a place where my struggle was soothed; the consulting room became the womb where my delusion was hosted and made a man,

The confidentiality of this act of creation was kept untracked. : sanitiser, waterproof cover, tales making grids; its cracks I looked at them they were so dirty yet unbreakable. I spilled.

“Don’t worry, I will get that”

I drew back and thanked again at knowing I couldn’t be accountable for the spills, my dead cells on the sheet, my traces... my cracks.

Confession - Comedown

I’ve been to altars, and on my knees I pleaded guilty to a being I could not hold their existence in me, the gravity engraved my skin with the texture of the stones which this worshipping place was made of. I remember it to be a painful experience to have to crack open the skin in order to be redeemed.

Things felt different this time, in this room the relationship I held with sin remained confidential, it manifested as a stain on the surface of the room, easily erased yet easily irritating. I barely had to show I repented from thinking about good and evil, my skin was no longer the surface to bare confession, it was safe to say I was dying without bleeding.

I began perceiving this room as the new altar for the immortal; a being that cannot be described by its evident traumas but its definition depends on contingency of conflict, it was clear this altar could not hold me neither could make me accountable for whoever my experience had made of me.

Subjectivity existed in its centre and at the edges of it, I felt I didn’t have to follow along the lines, it was a new microcosm where there was god without any proof of it.


False Delirium
2020
Performance and text