Rupturing Object White
RUPTURING OBJECT WHITE | emma starkey
How does a white/caucasian body rupture its historic image and dislocate its present perception?
Get Emma Starkey’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
This question is the methodological force of Rupturing Object White. To pursue it, whiteness has to be both interrogated and decentralised; otherwise the project would reproduce the epistemic structures it aims to dismantle.
I have refused to submit imagery or video documentation, except to explain early on why these forms were dysfunctional and ultimately not an option. I found that visual capture reinstates colonial legibility, flattening the work’s phenomenology and stripping away its capacity to rupture whiteness in real time. Documentation fixes the event, making it consumable, stable; it retains the fallacy of white, whereas the body is leaky and unpredictable. Refusing images allows the work to remain fugitive — unresolved, escaping tradition which relies on stability, and able to move beyond the frames whiteness demands. The present requires marble sculptures and paintings of sickly white people, in order to keep the fallacy afloat.
This project has required discomfort — an ongoing resistance to institutional pressures to submit to conventions embedded within hierarchical knowledge systems and colonial aesthetics. My refusal to comply has come at a cost: financially, through the loss of a 50% waiver; institutionally, through obstruction and misrecognition; socially, through isolation; and bodily, through the strain of holding my ground against structures that have internal hierarchies that expect compliance.
