BODY: Cassils

"Becoming an Image", Performance Still No. 3 (Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, Perth International Performance Festival), 2019. Photo by Manuel Vason

WORDS BY GUS LEDERMAN
INTERVIEW BY MICHAEL ZARATHUS-COOK

It’s circa November 2012, and a 2,000-pound monolith of clay sits in a blacked-out room at the ONE Archives in Los Angeles, a flashbulb hangs above it. Grunts and deep breaths are heard as images of a body in combat with this monolith are captured in fleeting flashes of light. This is the beginning of Cassils’s perpetual project, Becoming An Image, which has been evolving over the last decade as a continuous archive of trans visibility, violence, and aging. The project lives on as a counter to what seems to be the factory setting of our public discourse: the active erasure of this identity’s collective history. The spectrum of violence that exists around us—which we are losing sensitivity to at alarming rates—ranges from the gruesome broadcast of Israel’s attacks on Palestine and Lebanon to the subtle but intimate conflagration of anti-trans legislation being pushed in the United States. On the more intimate end of this spectrum, trans bodies are policed, displaced, invisibilized, and disempowered. A staged performance might be the last place we think of turning to in order to Becoming An Image seems designed precisely to propel us into embodied action.

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