Fabulating with Visceral Mechanisms

How might we represent a world that is actively coming apart? How might we depict the effects of the immense and irreversible destruction that is taking place before our very eyes — the destruction of bodies, of ecosystems, of shared narratives? What if, like Michael Taussig, we tried to think our way through disfigurement not as an act of mutilation but as a paradoxical intensification of presence itself? Thomas Teurlai asks these questions with brutal sincerity in artworks that display a vitality of survival, an organic and technical abundance in which violence doesn’t end life but reinvents its forms. It is in these interstices that I propose to reflect on the aesthetic potential of a biopolitics of disfigurement in Teurlai’s practice: from the way apparatuses of power inscribe death onto forms of life, to — conversely — contemporary aesthetics that embody a thoughtful and critical response to this inscribing. For in Teurlai’s work, it is not a question of saving, repairing, or even directly criticizing; instead, he fabulates through disfigurement in order to inhabit and reactivate the ruins, so that a myriad of new connectivities might be brought to life.