A poem by artist Victoria Sin for Dazed Beauty Issue Zero

'They Know It Has Shaped Them, They Know They Can Be Shaped, They Know They Can Shape Themselves' 

We created our identities from nothing after a lifetime of unlearning but we discovered that first came refusal.
No I am not what you say I am,
I will live my life and see for myself what I am and who I want to be,
I create that story for myself.
The end of the world was a refusal and an offering
To those of us who would look up from the world
And out at the sky and wonder
How many stars
How many worlds
How many ways of being alive
And most fixated on the most minute
Created barriers where there weren’t any
Made up rules to make our world smaller and simpler
As if we had not evolved to stand on two legs and look up
As if we had not evolved to stand up and
Look up from the ground and
Away from each other
And up at the sky and wonder
How many stars
How many worlds
How many ways of being alive
All we could do was look at each other
Pick our bodies apart and
Pick our beliefs apart and
Create a hierarchy of both and
Insist there was not one at all

+ + +

Ursula showed us, in one carrier bag, one vessel, one body, in this vast and complex sack of the universe, there is no such thing as one story with one beginning, which travels a straight path to one end.

At first it was dark
Before the bombs went off I had sworn in a moment that
It wasn’t that my life flashed before my eyes in the sense that I saw all the events and experiences that had shaped me
My life flashed in a way that I saw what I thought was my life was actually just the sum total of all the cells, the bacteria, the microorganisms, the enzymes, the proteins, the molecules in my body working together to stay alive
Vibrating, feasting, dying, reproducing, digesting each other
Shaping each other
And growing together in competition and symbiosis and the push and pull of the biochemical relationships between these tens of trillions of tiny beings and entire sum of all of these individuals made up of even smaller individuals working together and against each other to stay alive was my life and my perception and my emotions, my sexuality.
They create me
My experience is they/them/theirs
They are change and possibility
They resist categories
They resist clearly defined relations
They acknowledge their existence resisting their human instincts of hierarchy
They acknowledging them validating their multitude of individuals within me
As if I am not within me trillions of beings and
infinite versions of themselves
of myselves
of my cells
Combining and recombining and exploding
And then there was light
A flash of sheer brilliant silent light, brighter than the sun
So bright if you lay your eyes directly on it it was the last thing you ever saw

So bright if you covered your eyes and looked away still it illuminated your body so that through your closed eyelids you could see every bone and blood vessel in your hands covering your eyes

As if I am not within me trillions of beings and infinite versions of themselves
of myselves
of my cells
Combining and recombining and exploding

Victoria Sin is an artist and writer interested in using speculative fiction as a productive strategy of resistance. This is an excerpt from a text commissioned for the exhibition ‘BCE’ in collaboration with Sophia Al Maria (Jan 2019).