The Mutable Archive: A Cure for Immortality (performance still), expanded cinema performance in collaboration with Adam Hogan, Experimental Media Performance Lab (xMPL Space), Contemporary Arts Center, Claire Trevor School of the Arts, University of California Irvine.
The Mutable Archive: A Cure for Immortality
A Cure for Immortality is an expanded cinema work that draws from a long-term, ongoing project, The Mutable Archive. The work considers questions of evidence, ethics, and interpretation—particularly how historical and archival research intersects with critical theory and speculative narrative to address gaps in the historical record (aligned with critical fabulation, a concept developed by scholar Saidiya Hartman).
This project connects the history of anatomical collecting and medical display to present-day conversations around colonial violence, race, gender, class disparity, and cultural bias. Rather than treating medical archives as neutral, the work highlights uneven documentation and the enduring impacts of taxonomic thinking, including early eugenic frameworks, inference from incomplete records, and interpretive bias. The performance incorporates speculative narratives by collaborators Shimon Attie, Chelsea Knight, Buzz Spector, and Ellen K. Levy, and passages from texts that include The Bell Jar (Sylvia Plath) and The Willows (Algernon Blackwood).