rat city

RAT CITY

RAt City

RAT CITY 2024 is a mixed media performance in progress. A scenario where hyper metropolitan life of rats has become a desired commodity, the once impure and diseased city rat is now the hottest trend, a gentrified consumer product, still exploited in the laboratories with an aim to find a cure for the human condition. The performance is based on movement and voice research embodying characteristics of a cyborg chimera, a mix of human and rat in the year of a rat 2221. In this piece I am focusing on what is alienated within the flesh. In the performance the body is in constant negotiation with attaching into things and beings like a socio-political screaming cartwheel. The fundamental elements of this work are live camera work, poetry, scenography and an improvised live soundscape. The live camera work reflects upon urban isolation and digitally generated imago, tapping into the nostalgia of intimacy without a screen. The soundscape presents an aspect of a machine lover, technological secure attachment, a cyborg romance with language-voice-amplifier chain as well as TR8s drum machine, software synths, loops and effects. The soundscape is bringing out sweat, saliva and tears with a heavy, deconstructed beat carrying the performer’s voice throughout the whole performance with “underground” (metro) aesthetics and never ending transitioning beyond the binary perception. 

I am a cyborg underneath the city, squished in the little cracks that are wide open but hidden from the naked eye. I dance poetry and sing pain. I am a rat, fairy, human, alien, technologically extended non-binary life form suffering from urban isolation. My existence is resistance, I am experiencing constant friction. My direction is not just non-binary but multidimensional, maybe canceling direction itself and just spreading somewhat like a virus or plague. I am an intruder, outside the system in another system swallowed again by some kind of set practice of pattern recognition. I have been witnessing and resisting the city losing its soul. I resist, I destroy, I transition between realities and fantasies treating those as one. I have intimacy with the objects left outside alone and with humans I sometimes have a sense of belonging, I am collapsing, crushing into a cloudy love of revolution, of the expanding chaos that brings change. I have found romance in movement, in being against, leaning into, feeding an algorithm that sucks my data. I don’t buy, I exchange, I don’t apologize because of occupying space, I am in the position of making the eye naked, I am naked without a body, screaming into eyes, our surroundings, our attachments, no more artificial attachments based on constantly re-generated imagos, I want to love your flesh, bio-cyborg cellular mass made in a pool of slime and dna juice.

Currently ratting around Berlin, soon in Helsinki.

Please do contact me if you want to read more of the novel below or help me edit/proofread, help find a place to perform (can also be a public space, do suggest freely!), help with filming-we can do an exchange of some sort, or if you want to publish my text/video.

All in all hot fun twink poet and a dance etc. star looking for a hot free “daddy” curator for big scale planning. And I’m serious too, let’s make dreams come true.

My chest has been feeling so heavy lately and my heart has become faster and faster. It’s beating like a butterfly at nights when I try to close my eyes. I’ve been having random fevers and vivid dreams where I run through empty metro tunnels. I feel a need for pressure, pressure on my chest. The urge to make it flatter than is actually possible. I don’t want to play with pressure as a sensation. I want the pressure to take over, to take me out of the endless running. When I am on my all fours bent over I want nothing hanging of me, nothing, no weight of past lives or past forms. In the tunnels my body, my flesh gets ripped, it’s dark and I hit sharp objects in my panicked run. These pieces of metals cut me open violently and it’s a mess. Pieces of flesh here and there, hair and fur fluffily hanging in the stale air. Dirt getting into the open wounds making the blood textured. Creatures I can’t recognize in the dark are feasting on my blood, they are hungrier than I will ever be. Despite my fragile flesh falling apart I keep on running, there is no light to be seen at the end of these tunnels, just more of the same tunnel. I’m not searching for a light. I’m not searching for anything, I don’t have time. Soon I will have no body. Without a body my breath would keep running. I close my eyes. I close my eyes and tell myself I will never open them again. There is no point in seeing anymore, only feeling the tearing of my skin, my bones dislocating and my fat exposed to other rats that don’t care if I was born as a rat or not. My muscles are completely numb, I have no strength and nothing can make me feel strong anymore. my body has collapsed, it has vanished into the thin thin air with leaving marks everywhere. I am a scar. I am a scar on your arm, on your chest where i never laid my head because you were to scared to hold me even for a minute. Once you caressed the base of my skull with nervous strokes that unlocked me, you have too many keys that actually work, I have keys but they seem not to fit anywhere. Snakes, snakes, snakes coming in and out of our throats like passengers on public transport 4pm. I hiss at you, stay away with your beautiful hands and nervous strokes, you never loved me anyway you just liked the idea of me shedding my skin. You liked the power you had over me. It fed you like a starved mother. I despise you and your games. I despise myself and the games I am willing to play just to feel like a real thing, like real real being waking up to the moon and going to sleep at the sunrise and sometimes other way around, depending on the mood and the drugs. Like I can’t stop running I can’t stop loving. It’s a curse for sure, an unspeakable pain of not getting rest, not getting time. I will inject more and more installments into myself in the future, I wish to have a body, body that is not collapsing before I get pleasure. A fearless body that is capable of violence. Only my fear of being violent stands in between me and my transformation, I need to attack and destroy what is left of the perception of others. We have become so isolated from each other that violence is a stranger to us, even though it never disappeared. We deny deny deny our capacity to kill. We have become obsessed with care and softness or the performance of it, because when someone comes out of the tunnel ripped apart we have no trouble passing by pretending to not see at all. You remind me of me. You relate to me like I relate myself, with oscillating love and hate and it’s so real. Alone I disappear into non-existence. Now that the government has everyone singled out and separated, locked in and on a leash there’s nothing else to do but not to be real. Endless entertainment of identity politics and rediscovering different parts of codes that built us, but we are forgetting something. We are forgetting food, we are forgetting hunger, we are forgetting none of this theater will feed us when the delivery of fuel ends. None of our body parts will last. Only a month, it takes only one month to starve. I am looking forward to that month when my fever hits dangerously high and my blood boils and my organs yell. I am failing my love, I am failing the battle. My mind makes me sick. My sheets are soaked. You don’t appear on the screen anymore, it was a one time wonder and maybe a hallucination. It’s hard to tell the waking time and dreams apart because I don’t want to be awake anymore. I have never wanted to die this bad, I have never wanted to discover the collective terror this bad. I don’t know what happens when my heart stops beating but I know you stole it and abused it. I won’t ask you to return anything, probably you lost it somewhere between the unnamed cities. I’m done praying. I’m done saying please. I’m done having your face haunt me day and night. I can’t wait. I have to get out. That is the quickest way to go. I need to hack the code that keeps the door locked and windows shut. I need the polluted air to fill me, and as I gasp for the last time I will cum hard. I will cum hard for you so you will know that all this time you had me. You had me on chokehold. 

I’m scratching myself and these bumps rise on my ankles and forearms, they look like mosquito bites. They are. I snap out of my death wish. WHAT THE FUCK. Mosquitoes? How?

I climb out of my bed and I shed the clingy wet sheets and slowly I approached the dark window that has my dried cum and saliva all over it. I inspect the window carefully. Nothing unusual catches my eye. I feel out the bumps again and I am certain they are mosquito bites. No mosquitos should be alive. I shouldn’t be alive crosses my mind but I overwrite the thought instantly in my mind with death is not real, I’m not real. These mosquitos make me feel rather alive though. I can’t hear them but I can smell the blood. If there is mosquitos alive maybe there’s air. These living quarters are so fucking sterile and high tech sealed that I don’t think any mosquitos could’ve been hiding here for the past year. I’m not an expert on mosquitos as species though so maybe that is a possibility. Much more exciting possibility is that they came from outside. There is a faint noise of ventilation that has been too familiar to me to notice before these bites but now it fills my ears with a steady hum. I sit down on my bed. Everytime I am about to declare myself done there is a glimmer of hope. A thought of the ocean. A thought of your curls between my fingers. A thought of us underneath the blanket yet to be born. Whispering secrets to each other in a language that can’t be heard by  others. I can’t say your name without tears and my voice cracking. I thought rats might have less longing and more fire. But I am getting soaked in my own tears and sweat repeatedly. I have to piss. I go to my door and type in the number series for the toilet, a hologram of  a hole appears in front of me and I pretend to take a step. The scanner runs through and I’m done. Pee has been removed through my pores, evaporated and my bladder didn’t need to make the movement it was designed to do. It'll adapt to this stillness, it’ll shrink and I will become leaner as my inner organs become more and more useless. It’s been two days since I didn't consume any nutrition gel, because of my mission to give up and fall apart. I feel I could eat the skin of my own armI bite myself hard, it leaves a mark and I get a taste of bittersweet desperation that lingers on me. My room changed its size, I think someone killed themselves. Thanks to them I got a bigger space.

I’ve been thinking about Rat kings. All the tails entangled together, no escape, the struggle making the knot tighter. To die like that tied to each other, I wonder if I would like that. I have no sign of a tail yet. Not sure if it comes with the package. Weirdly I am waiting for it, waiting for the morning I wake up lying on my back and it’s uncomfortable since my lower back has started to arch. I can try searching for information but lately the internet connection has been very weak. I miss dancing, my body has entered such numbness that all the creativity of movement feels not accessible. I still train. Otherwise I can’t sleep and even though the difference between being asleep and awake has become very blurred I still recognize the times my mind leaves this room. Last night I was at a dinner table with this celebrity from a few hundred years ago that I don’t really know, a singer and an actress called Ariana Grande. We were eating chicken and I was telling Ariana how I can’t eat the skin, how it disgusts me and I just can’t. Arian was simply answering “then don’t.” I kept complaining and specifying that the meat I can eat even though I don’t necessarily want to but I can, the skin I just can’t, “Ariana, I just can’t”, I kept insisting. Ariana continued eating and looking at me and repeating herself. That was the dream, I woke up feeling very sick. I miss climbing trees. I miss the flowers and straws of hay and grass you used to put in your hair. My obsession over you is fading but it might be because I’m fading. The mosquito bites are fading and I haven’t gotten new ones. I’m still baffled by them but too paralyzed by isolation to continue further investigation. For a couple of days I have been just rather still. I have things in my room that I could use to entertain myself. I still have some needles and ink. I need a new name. Ray Dragonfly under the fake sun. I could try to poke an image of that into myself. I have always been drawn to things that are kind of ancient in the frame of human culture. Tattooing without electricity is definitely one of them. The spells I put on my body, mainly for protection, they pulse when I think of you. I felt your rhythm the other day. I tapped into it with ease and it felt like a promise of you being alive. I want to get out of this room, soon I will die if I don’t. The room got bigger yesterday again, someone else gave up as well. My thoughts run in circles, I keep repeating a few sentences: We are all zero, and your life will never be the same. I don’t yet  know what is the meaning of these sentences and why they keep repeating in my head over and over again. I’m not trying to stop them, I’m not trying to stop anything at this point. Free falling into this void designed to kill me, I don’t know if they expect me to resist and die out of disappointment or just give in and die again out of disappointment. What could I do that they don’t expect? Survive I guess. I could survive, our tails tangled in such a tight grip that we need to transform into zero just to get moving again. I wrote I’ll see you soon, okay? I wrote it 222 times with my blood. My thighs feel like marshmallows, it’s kinda pleasant. I’ve set the lighting to be blue, I like how my veins look in the blue light, how they almost disappear. There is something about my bloodstream that keeps me in an altered state. Feels almost like the circulation has changed its direction. I’ve been feeling increasingly warm and slimy. I guess my gel diet is becoming me, they have said you are what you eat for centuries. Imagine when eating was still a thing. It wasn’t just fuel that is supposed to support your vitals and get you through day after day in the most efficient way. I wonder if my body will ever decay. I remember hearing this one song by artist named LIPGLOSSBOY where he sang: “Suicidal and denial, when I die consume my ashes and I’ll be fine, I want to be digested and flushed down the toilet, be a lover like no other and