Short for Pyromania, Long for Everything Else (2026)
This performance work begins from the artist’s lived experience of obsessive doubt, magical thinking, and compulsive embodiment—often framed as symptoms of obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD). Facilitated as part (mad-) reading and part (micro-) choreography, the work approaches obsessive doubt as a particular mode of knowledge production: a compulsive and iterative return to what was done, remembered, or deliberately forgotten, in order to hold knowledge accountable for the consequences of its production. Here, obsessive doubt becomes a persistent refusal to let information settle into coherence and fact too quickly—a way of resisting the epistemic violence of premature certainty.
Drawing on Octavia Butler’s fictional drug Pyro*—a substance that produces euphoria through lighting and watching fires—the work understands addiction to fire as a political condition: a systemic compulsion toward illumination, acceleration, certainty, and the promise of resolution.. Against such fiery demands, the performance proposes doubt and deliberate delay as forms of resistance. Hesitation, repetition, obsessive checking, and magical thinking become ways of refusing to burn through ambiguity and what cannot satisfy sanist demands for explanation.
The performance unfolds as a material and somatic score of this refusal. Matchsticks are broken, mishandled, and wasted; the labour of kindling is displaced, making preparation a form of ceaseless rumination. Readings and minor movements repeat, flare up, co-hesitate, and fall apart. Fire is constantly anticipated—imagined onto body parts or smouldering within vocalised ruminations—but ignition is always impeded.
Despite a learned longing for resolution, Short for Pyromania, Long for Everything Else proposes a collective practice of tending heat, doubt, and delay. By foregrounding obsessive labour, hesitation, and deferred ignition, the work reframes fire not as spectacle but as a shared condition. It invites the audience to remain close to what flares, to sense their own thresholds for intensity, and to consider how knowledge, responsibility, and relation might operate when certainty itself is the substance being burned.
*Pyro is a reference from Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993).
