On Revelations and Muddy Becomings

2021 (video game, unity, 45 min. gameplay)

On Revelations and Muddy Becomings is a video game collaboration with the performer Odete and the game developer Petros Lales.

The work On Revelations and Muddy Becomings comprises three parts – a magical book, a video game and a performance – and aims to fictionalise a secret society connected to names such as Joan of Arc, Elagabalus and Chevalier d’Eon, from whom the artist claims descent, with the collaboration of the artists Tita Maravilha and Herlander. Set in a future archive of planet Earth, the play creates and inhabits a fictional land where archaeology is a hindrance, the ancestral body is somatically brought into the present, poems are seen as rituals and ghosts have room to laugh. Amid oils and magical dildos, hermaphrodite goddesses and interplanetary voyages, the performers take care of each other, potentially revealing a community beyond the truths of history.  Odete takes a critical look at the historical silence surrounding issues of the body, gender identity and queerness.