Metamorphoses: The Sequences (2010-2013)

Sequence One – In Four Movements (Narcissus and Echo, 2010)
Silent, four-channel split-screen digital film, rear-projected on custom screen, 16:9, 6 min 44 sec

Sequence Two – In One Movement (Hermaphroditus, 2010)
Silent, four-channel split-screen digital film, rear-projected on custom screen, 16:9, 6 min 41 sec

Sequence Three – In Six Movements (Byblis, 2012)
Silent, four-channel split-screen digital film, rear-projected on custom screen, 16:9, 7 min 21 sec

Sequence Four – In Three Movements (Myrrha, 2013)
Silent, four-channel split-screen digital film, rear-projected on custom screen, 7 min 37 sec

Metamorphoses: The Sequences is a four-part film series based on stories from Ovid’s epic Metamorphoses (8 AD), using Charles Martin’s Metamorphoses: A New Translation (2004) as a primary source.

In these myths, metamorphosis always occurs at the threshold of sexual initiation, signaling the subject’s descent into ego death and madness. The Sequences explore this moment as a site of sublimated energy, a suspension in which transfiguration becomes ritual. Each sequence is an allegory for inner forces erupting into form, visualizing transformation not as escape but as built-in instrumentality: a passage toward presence, joy, and eternal return.

Ovid’s central theme in Metamorphoses is the absurdity of survival. Each transformation marks a dramatic categorical shift, a sublimation of psychic conflict into physical form, annihilating any hope of transcendence or evolution, and ensuring the continued production of myth. The narrative weaponizes metamorphosis: transformation and shape-shifting become built-in conditions of violence, recursive tools through which chaos is perpetuated and more stories are born.

Traversing these finite bodies are infinite, eternal consciousnesses. They remain–trapped in wells, in trees, in the bodies of others–wholly absorbed in their fate, unwilling to reconcile with the biology of fear. This is the paradox of Metamorphoses: nothing in the structure of a metamorphic economy, honed to sublimate the horrors of life, can accommodate such a refusal to cease.

The Sequences seek to conjure these ambiguous presences and their (queer) affective atmospheres, moments suspended just after metamorphosis. Caught in the fleeting delight of self-discovery, they linger in the awareness of being. Each sequence traces a solitary figure performing quietly to themselves, within their own closed system: unperturbed, still, and entirely singular. These figures do not transcend their guarded threshold, self-absorbed and whole, quietly imploding in artificial makeshift gardens.

Sculpture #1: The Sequences, is a skeletal wood structure mapping the invisible geometric axes traced by the performers. The sculpture renders the choreography’s internal logic as spatial architecture; a quiet echo of trajectories, crossings and points of return.