2021

The multimedia installation Archive X (The Skin) is the third chapter of Hollow's ongoing meta-project The Archive where pre-existing worlds bleed into new ones.

As the story goes, the stretched out “Skin” has been shed by an imaginary character called MCATBOY who first appeared in Hollow’s 2018 performance Phoenix. Phoenix is a paracosmic event exploring the endless potentiality of reality blurring darkness in a decentralized, immersive cruising labyrinth. It revolves around the politics of desire and ecstasy, the difficulties of intimacy, and the normative structures evolving in today’s queer scenes. Meanwhile, it raises the questions: what can be experienced with the public and how can something be expressed publicly that is usually hidden and secret?

Each element of the installation can be considered as a piece of MCATBOY’s memory of Phoenix. While the film is assembled from video recordings at different Phoenix events, the vacuum bags contain costumes worn by the artists - as characters - during the performances. The story of the “Skin” and the character, bifurcating and reuniting over and over again, is told in a letter by a group of unseen specters yet to be explored.

Archive X (The Skin) was created in collaboration with Csenge Vass, a conceptual textile, costume, and visual designer creating interdisciplinary artworks through these fields of art. The sound of the work was created by Hollow’s long-time collaborators, musicians András Molnár and Tamás Marquetant.

The installation was presented at the exhibition Resisting Erasure - Queer Art in Hungary at Art Cologne 2021, curated by Queer Budapest (Zsuzsanna Zsuró & Thomas Roughan).