For the
Love of
Inquiry

Ella and Ayodamola were invited to write a chapter in The Gaze of the X-Ray: An Archive of Violence. (2024). Germany: transcript Verlag. We bent towards the speculative. get full text >>

Prologue

In this essay, we explore the X-ray from four perspectives, which we call 'folds.' The 'folds' embody literary endeavours that increasingly venture into the realm of speculation. The first fold aims to understand the socio-political ideals that the X-ray surfaced from, to understand the imaginations and desires that formed the technological device. This foundation allows us to reimagine and speculate about alternative variations of the X-ray. The second fold probes how dance can be used to resist the X-ray and its desire to fix its subject. In fold three, we speculate about the fantasies that arose in response to the X-ray. In the last fold, we build our own speculative technology that challenges the X-ray as a techno-political object.

Fold I: Fixing

During the 19th century, physicians longed to peer into the penetralium of the human body to identify diseases, but also to classify and sort the ideal body from the imperfect. Yet the body, a dense and impenetrable entity, could only be explored through hazardous methods like cutting flesh, where viscera, blood, nerves, and ligaments obscured the physician's vision, or through conducting terminal autopsies, where the corpse, in its imperfection, aroused sentiments of dread and anxiety.

We were heavily inspired by the way speculative story Princess Steel by W. E. B. Du Bois