Smart Defense, film, 18:26 & Ritalin necklace (made by Shreya de Souza)

shown as part of Halloween, The first Mutter Biennale, at Mutter, Amsterdam, 2023

The film collages notes from my therapy session, where I walk the viewer through an imaginative exercise of transforming emotional burdens from inter-personal relations, into totemic objects that can be returned to the owner in your minds eye. I gathered ai generated text-image from the prompt “girl returns sword to her father”. My thoughts move to the privilege of metaphors and the luxury of symbolic return, I think about the bodies under the rubble, I think about the image of a Gazan holding a missile remnant, manufactured by American company Woodward, “a world leader in systems for the most advanced guided tactical weapons”. I think about connection, abstraction and violence. Ritalin necklace was made for me by de Souza, encasing one of my pills in layers of leaded solder, a talisman for daily wear, hoping to channel the more positive aspects of my ropey relation with my medication.