Terrotic

2023

Heimat der Katastrophe>>>

Hollow Press>>>

When I was much younger, one day I discovered Bruno Schulz’s drawings of women trampling helpless, weak men. They fascinated me. Some time ago, I thought I’d like to do an anti-erotic comic (which would be a bit erotic, though). It occurred to me that these women torturing and trampling men could be juxtaposed with a world filled with over-sexualized images of bodies that are increasingly often purely virtual creations.

I began to imagine the history of a city.

A city that is populated by deformed and decaying beings who crave and lust after these virtual breasts and buttocks, penises and vaginas, tentacles and lumps of fat. However, contact with these virtual hyper-sexualized bodies would result in further violent mutations, disintegration of their real bodies, causing their death and rebirth. The beings in this city are trapped, unable to leave it, tortured to infinity by the content displayed on the billboards.

Some things remain open: do the mutants have gender? Are they males? Who manufactures the glasses? Why do they show smiling, square faces? Is the explosion of the mutant’s body under the influence of what it sees on the billboards a part of the city’s reproductive cycle? Was the man drawn to the computer addicted to pornography?

Sexuality and the fact of having a body constitute a very strange space. Sexuality combined with capitalist realism creates an even stranger space, a body-centric cult.

The cultural-biological obsession with a healthy body of the right shape, which, properly presented, properly virtualized, becomes the protagonist of the modern era. A biological steamroller equipped with screens, which is driven by amplified and mutated drives, self-flagellating itself in gonads and gushing hormones around, spreading complexes,
disorders and mental illnesses.

To quote one of “Doom patrol” characters: “mankind is sick, sick, sick!”. Or maybe life is.

Sometimes I fantasize that I could become a cyborg, and even if I wouldn’t be completely independent of my body, I could probably modify it at will, influence my endocrine system and see how it changes in my perception of the world. If free will exists, then access to it leads through the body. And through the rejection of identity as such. Do we really have to live limited by the idea that we are this or that? (...)