This week, I am putting the final touches on the zine version of necessary violence, the collaboration with my sister that includes my text and her visualizations. It's basically the portable version of the installation in the Strange Fevers exhibit (which by the way, will still be up through the end of May if you are in the Columbia neighborhood.)
This was another research heavy project, which involved a lot of online stuff as well as a lot of books ILL'ed (weirdly we have very little of this in our library). The project was spawned mostly by the strangeness of the Waukesha case, which I'd been thinking about for awhile, and the call for the Mansion anthology, which got me working on it in earnest. A lot of it was interest, as we discussed at the Colloquium panel, in the creepiness and agency of young girls. The more I read, the more it seems that these girls, with the exception of growing up in the internet age, were not so unlike me and my friends, with our little obsessions, our sleepovers, our strange activities. While ours didn't result in violence, I remember the fragile ecosystem of the slumber party, which sometimes erupted in fights over nothing and weird group dynamics. For a 12 year old girl, everything is personal.
Granted, there was mental illness at play, of various kinds. The one girl was pretty much early-onset schizophrenic, the other seemed highly impressionable. Parallels were often made to Heavenly Creatures and the fantasy worlds the girls lived in, as well as the drastic strategies they employed to maintain those fantasies. While our fantasies as pre-teens mostly had to do with whichever Tiger Beat cover boy we liked, they could have been much darker and just as obsessively wrought. So much was fantasy at that age--the way we played and interacted..I don't think it began to change until we were in highschool and our hangouts became less play-based. it's all especially fascinating to think about this in relation to Braid.
This necessary violence was born, told from a sort of collective voice of both the perpetrators and sometimes he victim. It's very dark as it should be, given that the Slender Man lore that spawned it is as well. I am excited as well about Mansion, which is just coming out, and includes some of the pieces as well as an amazing batch of poems on Slender Man mythos. Our obssessions are always good for telling us about ourselves, and the thing that jumped out at me was both the escapism from reality the girls sought, as well as the weird father-like quality of much Slender Man content, which creepily borders on also the erotic. Slender Man as someone who will save you, love you unconditionally, but there has to be violence as tribute.
