Cassils

"This vision of a collective rooted in the recognition of difference rather than in the comforting fictions of sameness is at the heart of the artist Cassils's latest durational performance, Undersight, developed in collaboration with lighting artist Christopher Kuhl and curated by Renata Azevedo Moreira for the City of Toronto's Nuit Blanche arts festival. On October 4, for twelve hours, from sunset to sunrise, Cassils projected powerful intermittent light beams into the night sky."

"Visible for miles around, these blasts of light were Morse code translations of a list of words deemed "suspect" by US federal agencies since Trump returned to office in January. These terms are being scrubbed from US government websites and documents in an attempt to remove all references not only to gender, sexuality, diversity, equity, and inclusion, but also to topics such as climate change and vaccines."

Jean-Luc Nancy's ontology asserts that being is essentially co-existence and that the self arises relationally; José Esteban Muñoz builds on that idea to describe a collectivity that includes the incommensurable. Cassils's durational performance Undersight operationalizes these ideas through a collaborative light installation. For twelve hours Cassils projected intermittent Morse-coded beams translating a scrubbed list of suspect words into the night sky. The project exposed governmental erasure of terms related to gender, sexuality, diversity, climate change, and vaccines. The alphabetical sequence and juxtaposition of heterogeneous terms emphasized the absurd breadth of censorship and the political erasure of difference.

Read at Artforum