COCCINUM; Fate Unwinding - Puer Deorum
11th June 2021 - July 10th 2021
We are laying, deep in slumber on top of the seashore.
Completely lost in the visions of our dreams.
Allowing ourselves to bask in the sunlight.
Completely unassuming or aware of the world beyond our current environment.
The sand below us trying to resist the weight of our bodies, our heads heavy, sinking down and
moulding into the landscape ever so slightly.
The tops of our bodies drying beneath the blurred rays of clouded heat.
The underside of our bodies wet with the residual water.
The horizon blurred between the sky and the sea, lost within shades of blue and grey.
The smell of seasalt wafting into our subconscious with the soft wind breezes, soothing our
sleeps.
A person wearing a brown suit walks in with a familiar, yet uncanny, large wooden apparatus.
In the near horizon of the shore, they place the furniture on the sand, the person stands back from it.
Looks at it.
The object has 4 legs, one large wheel, an arm with a significantly smaller wheel and a second arm. Red string running through the entire contraption, out through a small hole in the second arm.
The person steps closer towards it, looks at the object in a very concerned, yet content with delight, kind of gaze; and begins to unwind the string, quite erratically.
They walk away, and towards the sea.
Leisurely, but with purpose.
Red string in hand, being pulled from the contraption.
They begin to attach the end of this string to a large creature laying completely still, as though it had just been washed up ashore.
It has a humanesque face, yet not quite human - brown lined with green, long straight hair, ears stood tall - dainty in their movement against the ocean breeze.
They attach it to what seems like a wrist attached to a body covered amongst billowing black layers of texture.
They lift the creature up with a rigorous drag and prompt up, placing it into a standing position. Its stature and embodiment puppet like.
They check it’s malleability and movement, the general control they have over it,
lifting each arm, maybe a leg, ensuring it can move as they manipulate the limbs.
They pull more of the string from the wheel and attach it to another creature.
The only other one of their kind in the surrounding environment. brown faced, lined with purple this time, you couldn’t miss it.
They connect the string to this other creature.
They repeat the examination of limb-movement capabilities.
Puer Deorum
Puer Deorum ( They / He ) is a multidisciplinary artist based in London working primarily with documented performance (moving image), costume, and sculptural prop-making. Working as a performance based artist, they explore the nuances of intimacy, love, and touch and their personal censorship and repression under a homogenised gaze, highlighting complexities of interpersonal power relations and the concepts of ‘play’ and ‘purity.’ Their Bangladeshi heritage is harmoniously linked to their practise as a second generation immigrant, navigating and splicing through with a focus on the body and its subtle wavers to love and hyperawareness of self and identity. Their practise, an active mode of archiving a contrived, utopian scenario, a context that cannot be contextualised, in order to distort the audience’s preconceptions and projections concerning race, gender/sexuality, sensuality and class, disrupting the visual ambiance with abundant visual enticement. They develop sequences of surreal mysticism and fantastical ambience, parallel to feelings of eeriness and elongated moments of longing and connection. Blending these themes within an Othered identity to create an altered reality, using settings of real and manufactured landscapes to grasp viewers into the unknown, where the orientalised transcend beyond (post)colonial perception. Puer Deorum graduated from Fine Art at Goldsmiths, University of London in 2019, since then has completed the 2020-21 residency with We Exist London, and been awarded with the Set Studio Prize 2021.
