Martyna Miller, Se(x) Shelter

August 11, 2023

Opening: Friday, August 11 at 6:00 pm

Duration: 11–13.08.2023

Curator: Martyna Stołpiec

Guided tour: August 12 and 13 (Sat., Sun.) at 4:00 pm

Tour with Polish Sign Language translator—Sunday only

Can a picture be a shelter?

Sexuality is a special sphere to which the era of technological reproduction promised us wide access—though this was never to come true. Pornography—a consumable image of sex that is separate from experience and based on fantasy and fetish—was a kind of substitute and cover for the need for real discovery of subjective sexuality. Its emergence was historically bound up with the development of photography and video, media that facilitated the global distribution of pornographic images to all the social classes.

An important incident that accompanied these innovations was the discovery of Pompei and the decision to conceal it from view of the emerging modern states. This points to the depth and essence of what Foucault saw as the rift between experience and image in sexuality. Hiding Pompei from the citizens’ sight was a symbolic act, cutting off a significant part of our heritage while maintaining the thesis of its continuity, in which the Roman legacy sat at the core of European civilization. It is no accident that the discovery of the erotic wall paintings of one Italian community intersected with the darkest period for the body, the Victorian Era, and the prompt creation of the modern definition of pornography and its penalization.

Portraying a part of her sexual “self,” Miller and the project participants are fighting for the capacity for a subjective presentation of sexuality, and consequently, the subjectification and emancipation of us all as sexual, feeling creatures.

The Sexinsitu project takes the form of an archive, which is special in that it gathers data and materials that it creates itself, following a certain method. The basic unit is videos. These are based on a method of working with the body that conjures up the participants’ sexual recollections. These memories are based on events that once took place outside the space of the project, but which, for sociocultural reasons, could not exist in the social space. This means they have no equivalent in the world outside the project. The discourse of sexuality does not include the space of sexual experience.

The bundles of information processed in Sexinsitu—the memories—have been stored only in the participants’ minds. The basic premise of Sexinsitu is to be a prosthesis of this memory, an attempt to materialize intimate and ephemeral sexual events in a picture.

As such, this is not an archive in the classical sense of the word, it is more a visual archive project that produces its own technology (or developed method) as a basis for creating images of sexuality based on experience.

Participation in the project affects the participants’ experience, both individually and in the process of creating a society or alliance that brings together people using the technology. In this way we are designing a future which includes the possibility of a different understanding of issues of sexuality, for ourselves, for us together, for our loved ones and all those people who enter the orbit of the project as viewers or new participants.

Our common aim is to extract sexuality from the oppression of intimacy, from private individualization, and redirect it toward mutual communicativity.