Girls Against God

the attempt to transform a single artist’s vision into genuine collective self-expression. I see a tribute to patriarchy and capitalism, because they’re paying tribute to production, albeit a primitive production, but capitalism is after all already primitive. In the end we’re all producers, dreadfully productive ones, too, and there’s nothing capitalism loves more than productivity, eternally accelerating and ever more efficient production. Shit is the root of capitalism. The Friedrichshof commune has traced productivity right down to its roots, to the faeces, and as a result the ritual only loops back to the same Austria that they want to transcend. I see social control, I see capitalism, I see patriarchy, I see God.
The scenes that follow are the last we see of Miss Canada. She’s in a mud bath, performing movements that verge on erotic dance. Her whole body, apart from her eyes, is smeared with Europe’s brown mass. She spreads her legs, but there’s nothing between them, no laptop light and no genitalia, only brown thick mass. This scene is beautiful: Miss Canada has lost her own form, she’s part of the mud, she lives in a space filled up with a brown, shapeless substance.
I want someone to melt or disappear like that in my film too, like Miss Canada in the brown mud. But instead of first degrading them, I just want them to appear and disappear. And I want the agent to be black. Black is my colour, the colour of the Norwegian underground; brown is too similar to Austria, too Central European. It’s darker up here, smoother, quieter. I picture something that corrodes into black and disappears; perhaps we’ll all be digitised and I can live entirely online, or maybe it will be a more straightforward corporeal death. Perhaps the black fluid is coming from the body itself: the gall oozes from people; the insides take over, destroying the outside, our subversive components give us a texture that we didn’t know we had, but not with something we produce, just something that’s always there, something we don’t feel. Something that exists, shapeless, inside us, like blood, because we can’t stab our blood and feel pain. This blackness should disintegrate us. In the end we’ll look like little foetuses, and then we’re gone. THE END.
Maybe the only way an artist can escape capitalism and patriarchy today is to use art to disappear as an individual. The artists must completely wash away their person and self-expression, along with their individual characteristics and even their own imprint, their own life in the physical world. The artist’s person, ego and even body must disappear quite literally into gunk, shit and black bodily waste. That’s where something new can start.
I won’t be able to write this, but I’ll try. I want writing that can summon death, that can summon the disintegration of human tissue. The tissue melts in a chemical, or magical, or alchemical reaction. I don’t desire total freedom, or total misanthropy. Do you get that? I desire magic, the same alchemical reaction that transforms hatred to a new or strange form of love.
That might be why I’m writing this to you. I need someone to write to, someone else, someone who isn’t here and who I’m pulled toward. This yearning for you is a yearning for the unknown, the unwritten; the impossible place. Like the love reflected in the death scene I want to write in the film, or the love in a collective suicide. What sort of love is this? Self-sacrificial love in its furthest extension? Or is it love of the object, art, self-destruction? The destruction of our incomplete interpretations of relationships, life and death, you and me?
Where the writing is going, and where Venke, Terese and I are headed, I don’t know yet. But I wanted to write to you. I just feel like I’ve gotten closer to you now. Am I crazy?
I rummage through the bile gunk, that gelatinous black background, with my little white letters. I find something in there, little blind bits. I’m getting closer to something. Intimacy. Love through murder, writing that kills, fusion. Do I write people to death to get closer?
I write a satanic pact between you and me. THE END.
Rituals
As I type in I write a satanic pact between you and me … in the email application, the word I is corrected to AI by the automatic spell check. Representation and subject are switched. In the future there are no boundaries. YOU could be UUE, or maybe that O could stretch a little further, into the magical DOC or DOCX of the text. ME could be MPEG or MP4, the same file format as the black metal bonus material, the same format that my film will become in the end. The transformation and magic have already begun, the formats converted to rituals around us.
Let’s all zoom out a little, and turn the camera to face out. We’re on a street. It’s dark, it has to be night. The wind howls. The beams from the scattered street lamps don’t reach each other, and we are in the dark spot between two lit stretches. Further up we can see the branches of a tall birch sway in the wind, but around us it’s dark, as if we have to see through darkness to get to the light. The here and now is blackened. It has been rubbed out, or doesn’t exist for us. But the future, over there, that we can see. Behind the swaying branches we see the contours of a building. Slowly we close in on the light.
The building in front of us looks familiar, the colour, the contours, it’s got to be the old Munch museum, but as we move closer, time gradually picks up its pace. This has to be 2019, so the paintings have been packed up and moved to their new home in Bjørvika, and now it’s closed, it’s probably 2020,