Ecce Homo
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Ecce Homo is a personal yet public ritual; a queer autobiographical gesture that blurs the boundary between art and live; a temporal marker that ceremonially opens a space for remembrance and commemoration, seeking to invoke forces of transformation towards a new becoming.
Conceived as a time-responsive piece, at its core Ecce Homo involves a phlebotomist drawing 220ml of my blood, which I then use to make and cook a black pudding. Structured as a kind of liturgy, the work includes readings conducted by volunteers drawn from the audience, a moment of revelation, and a eucharistic invitation to eat a spoonful of 'Himmel und Erde' (Heaven and Earth, a German side-dish that usually companies black pudding). The service finally culminates with the sacramental action of eating the black pudding I have prepared.
Images by Tiu Makkonen.
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Located under the long shadow cast by the AIDS crisis, the work is not just a re-imagining of the Christian eucharist but also draws on the figure of the sin-eater, one who consumes the sins and sorrows of the dead. A ritual in the Celtic tradition that peaked between the 17th to 19th centuries, in this practice a person would eat a meal of bread and beer in the presence of the recently deceased – symbolically taking on their sins and absolving the soul for passage into heaven. It also invoked the ancient Aztec deity Tlazolteotl, the goddess of sexuality, lust, sin, filth, and purification, often called the 'Eater of Filth'. |
Images by Tiu Makkonen.
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The work's title, Ecce Homo, Latin for 'behold the human/man', recalls Pontius Pilate’s words as he presented the scourged Christ to the crowd; words which emphasised Christ’s humiliated human condition. In Christian spirituality, this moment and the words 'ecce homo' became a site of meditation on suffering, compassion, and sacrificial love. At the same time, the work’s challenge to radical self-knowledge and self-affirmation, defiantly refusing the strictures of imposed morality, echoes some of the ideas in Nietzsche’s posthumous and homonymous autobiography (Ecce Homo, 1908)
Inhabiting the threshold between the sacred and the sacrilegious, Ecce Homo is a rite of queer becoming and rebirth that not only symbolises something, but seeks to make it present and manifest. Embracing what is normally hidden, repudiated and stigmatised it attempts the transmutation of vulnerability and shame in a sacrament of remembrance and resilience. The audience is invited, as a congregation of active witnesses, to partake in this tenderly transgressive liturgy.
Images by Tiu Makkonen.
[A special thank you to BUZZCUT for making the first iteration of the work possible.]
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