Aun Helden
Aun Helden is a being of the natural world trying to birth and break out: “I'm a dream, a dream of myself, and when you're a dream you don’t need destiny, your body is made of lives and deaths…I am myself a tree-root rioting against concrete”.
How would you describe the evolution of AUN?
I'm a dream, a dream of myself, and when you're a dream you don’t need destiny, your body is made of lives and deaths. You can see and touch this process in my artwork.
This process is made by the understanding of my complexity. I always feel that when I get in touch with a new, different part of my body, I always discover a new whole universe and its own complexity. I'm just in the beginning of a relationship that has no end, so it's evolution.
If you released a fragrance what would it be called and how would it smell?
I would like to create a fragrance that I not only can smell but feel. For example, when you put it on your body you will feel the liquid attaching, like liquid latex becoming skin, or sperm after you cum, but not permanent like those, very quickly, like a precious moment. I love the smell of dried blood, I think it's sexy but sweet like that famous picture on the internet of a mouth licking dried blood, you know? But of course, mixing with artificial things that I would like to create with my own hands.
Do you have any significant inspirations, whether this is a moment an individual or something else?
I love to spend a lot of time just thinking and creating images that don't even exist. It's way better when I'm looking to a beautiful landscape (this can be nature or a place with beautiful furniture). But now, I think my biggest inspirations are writers. I write a lot too, and I'm in love with turning writing into images. My favourites at the moment are Audre Lorde, Roberto Piva, Tatsumi Hijikata, Paul B. Preciado, Clarice Lispector and Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro.
Your work is very centred around the natural world. Why is this?
Because I am myself a tree-root rioting against concrete.
So, you have just finished working on OMEM. Can you tell us about the background behind this?
OMEM is about hormonal processes as identity builders. It's not exactly about transgender hormonal therapy, but how testosterone and oestrogen really build identity, and in the middle of this process, how desire and solitude also can be creators of identity. I have an ambition to create a failure of all those protocols and make them implode, so I can experience death as symbiosis of the transgender process - when you stop to only being hungry but also becoming food to the world.
How do you intend for your work to be consumed or perceived?
Like a megalomaniac epic poem, like a dream, like disobedience, like a theatre opera play who doesn't simulate anything, but stimulates processes of living, like when you're swimming in your mother's womb.
What are your hopes for the São Paulo arts scene?
I think the art scene in Brazil is very powerful, we are eating our bodies and throwing up new social imaginary. We have no support to make our art, we do it because we need it, it is also a life process. I dream about healthier processes, but I don’t wait sitting, I keep doing it for me and my friends.
Can you describe your utopia?
'I Want a dyke for President' by Zoe Leonard becoming reality would be the utopia that we need now.
Can you describe your dystopia?
I don't have even to imagine, we all already living a lot of dystopias from a long time. But I'm trying to focus on the utopia.
COVID and lockdown has brought many struggles. Do you have any advice to others, particularly those in the arts, to cope during these difficult times?
Time does not exist, but different meanings are built on time. In that moment we see how ephemeral things are. In the field of art, capitalist time rules, which kills all our processes and turns us into bloody machines, don't let it all kill your complexity and your strength. There is always someone needing what you are producing and moving on is a way to destroy the time that kills us.
interview KATE BISHOP
More to read
