In a lecture, artist Johannes Paul Raether offers insights into his work and presents three of his so-called ›Self Sisters‹ — a flock of alien figures which develop their own forms of reproduction and mutation. The ›SelfSisters‹ appear in a performance-system titled ›Potential Identities‹, which Raether initiated in 2008 and has been developing since. Based on a complex genealogy, which the artist calls the identitecture, the bodies of these identities have undergone various transformation and can assume different ›skins‹.
These ›SelfSisters‹ form a temporary community — a gathering of identities — with the audience during teach-ins, lecture-adventures, processions, walking tours and rituals. Running counter to heroic notions of subjectivity and triumphal political action, the ›SelfSisters‹ enact mutations on their own bodies. This is an experiment that blurs the normative clarity of singular meaning and through intentionally obscure language highlights the vulnerable position of non-normative social behaviors.
