How does a white/caucasian body rupture its historic image and dislocate its present perception?

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This question is the methodological force of Rupturing Object White. To pursue it, whiteness has to be both interrogated and decentralised; otherwise the project would reproduce the epistemic structures it aims to dismantle. 

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Throughout the research, I have refused to submit imagery or video documentation, except to explain early on why these forms became untenable. This refusal emerged not from an opposition to documentation itself, but from an increasing awareness that visual capture repeatedly returned the work to regimes of legibilty that the practice was attempting to unsettle. Documentation fixes an event into an object that can be accumulated and circulated. In doing so, it can flatten the phenomenological complexity of an encounter into a stable representation, stripping away its capacity to rupture whiteness in real-time whilst reducing the work to representation.

 

Documentation stabilises the event, making it consumable, stable; it retains the fallacy of white, whereas the body is leaky and unpredictable. Refusing images allows the work to remain fugitive - unresolved, escaping tradition which relies on stability, and able to move beyond the frames whiteness demands. The maintenance of whiteness relies upon forms of representation capable of stabilising and reproducing its image.

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​This project has required discomfort - an ongoing resistance to institutional pressures to submit to conventions embedded within hierarchical knowledge systems and colonial aesthetics. My refusal to comply has come at a cost: financially, through the loss of a 50% waiver; institutionally, through obstruction and misrecognition; socially, through isolation; and bodily, through the strain of holding my ground against structures that have internal hierarchies that expect compliance.

 

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