“It is terrifying when you finally understand just how much of your emotional life is ruled by forces that are buried so deep in pain that you cannot get to them. Again and again, you find yourself running against the same spear, and the spear keeps going right through the same wound, widening it and making it more and more painful. But from the deepest wound of your life can grow its miraculous possibility.”
Cruising an enchanted forest, a mirror-masked flâneur encounters a series of oracles, each with forgotten wisdom to impart to him through song.
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Borrowing the words and voices of gay elders from religious and mystical scholar Andrew Harvey to British essayist Quentin Crisp to founding Radical Faerie Harry Hay, The Legacy weaves together a spiritual manifesto for queer men, reigniting a battle cry for personal and collective metamorphosis.
The Legacy is exhibited on a unique screen in a vertical, ornamental shape and is accompanied by the mirror mask worn by the video's protagonist, as well as an editioned, silkscreened bookwork (50 + 5 a/p) featuring a fairytale summary and key texts from the video.
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The video was filmed in the Grünewald Forest in Berlin, and features performances by artist colleagues Rémi Groussin, Tomi Paasonen, William Wheeler, Jean-Ulrick Desert, and Gerd Brendel. It premièred at the exhibition Legacy at Dazibao Montreal, in 2010.
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Critical writing about The Legacy includes “Miroirs Trompeurs” by Marie-Ève Charron in Le Devoir, 2010; and “Sexology’s Beholders” by Sabine Kriebel, in the book Not Straight from Germany: Sexual Publics and Sexual Citizenship since Magnus Hirschfeld.
