Text by Piotr Bockowski
Vital transformations of bodies beyond definitions of human sexuality came to the forefront as the most indulging visions of the Post Porn Art Fest in Warsaw at the beginning of June. The ‘post-pornography’ themed film event is part of a global movement mobilised to reinvent pornography from critical perspectives of politics that situate the body within the context of society, gender relations, market forces or systemic calculations and repressive techniques, which animate what Peter Sloterdijk describes as cultural ‘human farming programs’. Watching some of the most sophisticated films of the festival, the audience was inevitably manoeuvred away from a direct focus on erotic excitement and towards an analysis of abject life, extinction of human species and technologically simulated necrophilia.
A collection of bizarre fantasies, Dark Ecologies; Interspecies Alliances short film series evoked ambiguity of alien abductions. The opening piece, Arcane by Cremance (Mexico 2023), was a noir bathroom scene gently enveloped by fading tones of organic discolourations on the interior surfaces. An anxious woman, with uneasiness masking arousal, was taking care of an expired creature nesting in a bathtub. As she was weaving cocoons for dead insects and birds, her viscous fluids were dripping onto a mergence of severed human limbs, suggesting a violent departure from the human condition coated by lechery. Tangle torn limb from limb by cinematic close-ups and cuts were semi-static apart from a slight pulsation of organic matter – just enough to remind us about the living processes that persist after humans and even before them, if not despite them.
As Steve Finbow pointedly dissected in his Grave Desire, a cultural history of necrophilia, the sexualisation of dismembered bodies turns them into erotic tools that expose the bare bones of stimulation mechanics. Thus, the bathtub-cocooned bodies of Cremance existed as mere organ bundles, linked signifying chains of desire; devoid of a self, a consciousness, they became partial objects of sex toys for the viewers dehumanising imagination.
Mystifying morbid mechanisation in forms of more or less sophisticated excitement, The Future is Now short film program was centered around an interrogation of a femme bimbo sex doll by a group of philosophising intellectuals in Musing of Mechatronic Mistress: the peculiar purpose of Tiffany the Sex Robot by Jasmine Hagendorfer (Austria 2023). Offering tactful (as regarding an assumed autonomy of the robotic sex slave) criticism of Tiffany’s existence, her interlocutors were urging her to become aware of the particular political context of her industrial manufacturing as well as possible societal repression and violence (against sexual minorities) imprinted in her stereotypical hyperrealistic design.
The conclusions, presented as optimistic transgressions of said repression, mostly gravitated towards the promise of Tiffany abandoning her all-too-fertile shapes and transforming beyond human characteristics – mutating towards nonhuman creatures or simply falling into clusters of body parts if not absurd organelles, which will have no living functions apart from making themselves available for sexploitation. Proclaimed by future sex robot enthusiasts, the figuration of cut female breasts merged with abstracted nuptial vulva espouses sexual liberation as much as it perfectly answers necrophiliac analytical fixations on detached body parts.
Although Steve Finbow argues, in his conversation with Martin Bladh, that sex dolls are not a feasible answer to authentic necrophiliac projections, post-porn fetishism nevertheless opens up sexuality towards a dialogue with bodily death and decay. Arousing dehumanisation, the reduction of the human to the thing, ‘the it’, the sex tool, the utensil, an ontic nullity that may be either machine-like (…) or fetishistic (…) may as well lead to the strongest orgasms.
This realisation inevitably oscillated around several short film programs introducing (bio)politics tied to sexuality in Latin America (what represented the main direct affiliation of Warsaw’s PPAF this year). Arguably one of the most intense films of the festival, Film for a Blind Poet by Gustavo Vinagre (Brasil 2012), presented during Critical Pornographies of Abya Yala, portrayed a sightless sadist who forces degraded bottoms to lick dirt from his feet and consume his faeces. Finally, as an ultimate act of excess against society, eroticism becomes decoupled from the human body as such. It transforms into unconditional submission to microbial decomposers feeding off of excreted human tissue.
