Bacchanal — Part I · Proof & Lyric

Bacchanal · I

Introduction

The colour was never the thought. We were looking for fabric that would behave in water the way we wanted it to behave — not cling, not hold the body, but become a world the body could reside in. And ultimately be transfigured by.

This is the beginning of a long project. It is adjacent to the historic, but its poetics are urgent and present with me, and pushing into a future centered in a different discourse — one not yet fully discovered.

The images are complete fiction, almost happenstance. They are not meant to represent every human. They represent a human capacity, and fundamentally a human tendency.

Proof & Lyric / K7N

You came to this through Livy — a strange door to enter by.

Through wanting there to be a book. I had photographs before I had a subject, and I wanted somewhere to sit with a text. And there is one. Book thirty-nine. It turns out to be written by the prosecution — a man in the reign of Augustus, telling Rome a flattering story about its own alertness.

Rome reports women with authority. It reports the enslaved standing level with the free. And it files all of it under crime — because it has no other cabinet to put it in. Illegibility gets recorded as menace. That is not a Roman failing. That is what states do.

K7N — Transfiguration

Transfiguration is an underappreciated idiom, and I think that’s partly because in a Western literary sensibility its origin is Christological. It’s Jesus of Nazareth transfigured before the disciples who would become apostles — this advancing out of incarnation. In a biblical-critical sense it functions as one of the proofs. It’s load-bearing. It’s one of the pillars through which you construct a narrative of divinity emerging from human life, and that narrative needs things: it needs miracles, it needs confirmations, it needs witnesses. The whole apparatus of testimony.

But transfiguration is also quotidian. It’s a stretch to put those two words together, and I think that stretch is exactly what poetics is. Poetics is the attentive device. It is the experiential instrument through which the basically banal exercises of survival become the full-stone thing we call life.

K7N, cont.

Which leads me to a question I can’t answer and can’t put down: are we the only storytelling creatures? And I think that is what the Bacchanal is about.

The Bacchanal is the natural condition of the human creature. Storytelling, myth-making, ritualising — transfiguring the quotidian into something sustentive, formative, shareable. Something that pushes the boundaries of experience into a consciousness existing not only across shared minds and bodies but beyond the life of the individual, transferred generation to generation. Though even to say generation is already to mythologise.

Transfiguration appears in folklore and mythology everywhere in the world, and it is underused in the colonised West. I am looking through what is essentially an Afrofuturist lens — trying to understand human capacity, human mythologising, human tendency. That is what my interest in Bacchanal is rooted in: my own search for a narrative that sustains, one that is not sequestered or under fire by institution.

Proof & Lyric / K7N

You’ve said these images are complete fiction, almost happenstance. Which is it?

They are definitely constructed. And I am also trying to understand what it is I want to see. With the series I want to keep reaching — to understand how different kinds of bodies appear in the bliss of the Bacchanalia. I am searching, reaching, curious, and admittedly a little in love with the notion of my own body in Bacchanalia — treating those other bodies as a vision for my own, even though the bodies are quite different.

The lead is Lynix, who could well have been a leader in the group — they approach the world from a spiritual, aesthetic and philosophical point of view, and it comes through in the frame. What you are seeing is an aesthetics of spirituality that is also fundamentally erotic. Few people touch that in life. Much of the force of this first shoot is theirs — a kind of genius.

Proof & Lyric / K7N

You said you’re a little in love with the notion of your own body in Bacchanalia — that you’re using these bodies as a vision for your own. Will you ever be in front of the camera in this series, or is the substitution itself the work?

No. I don’t expect to put my own body in the midst of it. I find it less interesting, less fanciful. I want a world from within. I want the life of the mind — this is about the life of the mind. It will be important for me to make a world I can see myself in, can see myself belonging to and enjoying. Important to close a distance between the worlds I’m imagining and my own experience, my own body. Maybe that happens over time with the series.

I began my ritual studies in very familiar contexts — religious contexts, cults, rites and rituals. I started with what I knew deeply, and now I’m pushing my imagination. The other thing I knew intimately, besides church and Christian religion — having studied theology, having been a practitioner, a devotee, involved in cultic practice, involved in creating ritual at a very high level — was the theater. I was, at the same time, growing up in the theater, a person of the theater. So the name Dionysus was almost like saying the name Chekhov. Very familiar to me. I knew what was meant by the feeling of the word, by the characters and the mythological history it evoked. Even in Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia I was always drawn to Bacchus — to Bacchus, and the dryads and nymphs.

K7N — The Edges of Sacrament

So I want to know about that. I want to know about the edges of sacrament. When you think about wine as a sacramental material — I want to know about the edges of sacrament, and what they make possible. What they incite. There are spaces at the edge of ritual, and the theater, in modern times, is more accustomed to going there. But even in evangelical worship you reach this place of ecstasy. Hands are raised. People are crying. In Pentecostal environments there is the falling out — falling out in the spirit. Some people are, in essence, unconscious, in trance, and they wake feeling refreshed, transformed, revitalized. It’s a very curious practice, and a conspicuous one — it isn’t obscure. It’s all over the world. And when we say Pentecostalism, I think we mean an embodied ritual practice in which, within the Christian context, you see people edging toward the edges of sacrament — the edges of what would be acceptable — and people accept it, because you were taken over by the Spirit. “Slain in the spirit,” some traditions say.

There is really something to this. It’s a kind of wakeful baptism — a term I want to explore. Baptism is the one ritual I never dealt with in my artistic practice. I dealt with the sacred text — the reading of the text, the chanting of the text. I dealt with the sacrament of Eucharist. I addressed all these things, and I’ve exhausted my desire to dive into those rituals and their efficacy, the power of them. Where I am very interested is being slain in the spirit — and where that occurs outside a religious setting. Because if one were to be slain in the spirit at the nightclub, what would happen? They would probably call the ambulance. At the mall, in the classroom — again, the paramedics. But if one were to be slain in the spirit during a performance, on stage, one would probably be commended for artistic expression. For transcendence. It’s possible. It’s conceivable.

K7N, cont.

I’m wondering about the edges — not the realm of mental health and the question of psychosis. That’s not my question here. It’s a worthy dialogue, taken up by my good friend Chandrika Metivier, who takes up the subject of schizophrenia very directly — its valuations, its uses as a mode of navigating beingness. And there are others making curious studies of the future identity of autism, of what neurodivergence reveals about the capacities of the mind. There are studies saying we use only part of our mind. So I wonder what the connection is between that delimited approach to the life of the mind, our regular functions of the mind, and this being caught up — this being slain in the spirit. These modes have been studied, probably ad nauseam. But never in this cultural moment.

We haven’t taken them up post–queer theory, post-ballroom — after the dance spaces the queer public and queer performative bodies have brought into consciousness. Ways of being that are transfiguring and defiantly rigorous. Look at jookin: so dynamic as to be almost otherworldly, to transcend the body. It is certainly a transfiguring practice. And it sits closely alongside Pentecostalism — it echoes it structurally: the circle, the people coming into the midst of the circle, the fervence, the power of the trance, the community in trance, the evoking. Edging toward some state or condition that can’t be planned, but is certainly celebrated when it’s witnessed. There, again, is my overall artistic theme — the bearing of witness and the giving of testimony. But it isn’t helpful to apply call and response here, because this is something that takes over. Something beyond call and response — in the Bacchanal, in being truly slain by the spirit, truly caught up.

K7N, cont.

And to do that as a group — in some ways I feel it’s what everyone, every human, wants. There seems to be an inherently native condition. Being caught up, being slain in the spirit — I want to know the history of this practice of bringing oneself into proximity of that kind of possibility. And so much of the history is of its being squelched. Oppressed. Shut down. Even in religious contexts — certainly in Christian church contexts, there have been whole movements to shut down the possibility that someone would lose control of their faculties and enter another consciousness, one that pushes the body to its full limits and then takes you into another realm. It’s a history fraught with the attempt to control — and equally, with the ever-present desire to be both a witness of this and a participant in it. That is how fundamental this kind of experience would seem to be for the human creature.