ECSTATIC is a publication resulting from a discussion between visual artist Russell Perkins, writer and law researcher Aurelia Guo, and curator Salomé Burstein. It was initiated in the making of an exhibition carrying the same title and taking place in September 2024 at Shmorévaz. The show was composed of Perkins’ Static (2023), a video piece made in collaboration with sound designer Charlie Culbert and consisting of an assemblage of found-footage from US electoral celebrations from the 1970s to recent times, paired with a field-recording of the wind blowing in the tree facing the artist’s bedroom.  An invitation to freely respond to the video, I want our nation to grow is a text commissioned to Guo that looks into festive, patriotic and ideologically loaded images and paraphernalia. A montage of sentences gleaned from articles, essays or encyclopaedia entries, I want our nation to grow investigates the rituals and rhetorics which a nation-state relies on to perform and reproduce itself: parades, pageantry, parenting amongst others. It draws specific focus to the weaponizing of female bodies for procreative purposes, the completion of a fate designed by the heteropatriarchal order, and an overall coercion of individuals within the borders defining “nation state” identity in terms of race and belonging. 

Design: Martin Desinde

Editor: Salomé Burstein
Language: English
Publisher: Shmooks
Size: 13 pages
Year: 2024

Price: 10€
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