“Clinique, Clinique” performance by Ville Laurinkoski

In conjunction with opening of the exhibition ALAS, Finnish artist Ville Laurinkoski created a text piece and presented a new performance work over the phone from his apartment in Helsinki.

Here is the artist’s statement to accompany the work, as well as the text piece and the audio file from the performance.

“In Clinique, Clinique, desire is the force that constitutes the queer. Desire works through different affinities and here in particular the clinical. The Birth of The Clinic by Michel Foucault leads through the genealogy of the clinic. Paul B. Preciado’s pharmacopornographic regime is where we end and from which this clinic begins.

The clinic and the clinical are channels for a trans desire to work. The trans desire works in, with, and through the clinical, traversing the spaces and the architecture, the work by Julie Falk and Trine Struwe. It is the sensual gaze that manifests itself in the matter. The text Clinique, Clinique functions as a performance score. In the performance the text leaves the literal space and becomes sounds and ambience, affect that carries off. The clinical trans glance is immediate – knowing by looking without the help of the language. It is knowing what one is – not the identity but the material potentiality of a body. New gender technologies have destabilised the gender binary. This makes possible the trans desire to work.

New bodies and subjectivities emerge in the pharmacopornographic regime. This is a capitalistic production and as we know it’s not sustainable. To change the dominant structures means to abolish the oppressive machine as a whole. How does the ethics of the accelerated clinical desire then look like? Affirmative, I propose. Clinique, Clinique is a garden of affirmation – a volution of the accelerated clinical trans desire. The winds are blowing in from the paradise and for that we need a queer politics. A politics of desire!”

Ville Laurinkoski

See more about ALAS exhibition here.