V Barratt
“no rock no flower”

no rock no flower

no hard no soft
no strong no delicate
no shard no petal
something else—a venous sliver of hardened love,
a blossom of crystalline tears

Dissolution as Beginning

Dissolution becomes her.

Not an end, but a becoming.

Narcissus leans over the pool and shudders, shatters—not into annihilation, but into ripples of possibility. A moral reading of the Narcissus myth presses a cautionary tale onto a story of metamorphosis. What if we read it instead as a manual for transmutation through dissolution?

Narcissus dreamt that to become beautiful, one first learns to value beauty in the erotic privacy of self-education. No human wretch is born beautiful, and Narcissus was infamous for an intensity of self-education. (Schneider, 2022)

To dissolve is to become plural and one. To become the pool itself—its surface, shimmer and depth. Inseparably mingled in boundaryless affect. Oscar Wilde’s Narcissus tells us the water turned to salt with the tears of the grieving Oreads, even as the narcissus flower bloomed—salt and flower: two registers of dissolution. One crystallises grief, the other transfigures form.

In no rock no flower Andrea Illes’s mythic pool is the camera’s eye—restless, surveilling, sometimes violent. Yet here the pool is also possibility: a surface that glitches, morphs, and produces the self at keyframe 111, between versions. A flash of the “real you” appears, only to vanish. This is auto-portraiture under duress: the self glimpsed in the unstable frame, always too late or too soon. The true “I” glimmers not in reflection, but in the flicker—the in-between.

The Eye and Its Violence

The eye as obscene aperture, a wound that looks. The eye as hunger, as violence. For transfemmes, the eye has always been sharpened, an ocular blade. It surveils and slices bodies into ribbons, raw adornments for hateful speech.

The body is declared wrong—faggot, wog, dirty, filthy, disgusting—by the violent eye.

Declared beautiful, impossibly beautiful. Praised, adored, desired.

Still violent.

Andrea lives this contradiction: "I am aware that I am wrong, I am aware that I am impossibly beautiful."

The over-seen body is warped by vigilance: the faltering, falling, dancing body reaching for itself under the pressure of being seen. Arms elongate, the back arcs, the body straining, crawling toward itself.

Insisting!

Driven by a devotion without limit, to be seen, to see itself shimmer back.

no rock no flower seeks a loving eye, a tender aperture. The camera re-purposed as caress. The loving eye operates differently. Where the violent eye insists on categories—male/female, right/wrong, real/fake—the loving eye sees process. It grants opacity: relation without capture. It understands that the body it beholds is always plural, always exceeding the frame. Hyper-vigilance becomes hyper-agency: self-imaging inverted into art, insisting on too much beauty, too much self; a refusal of the metric of “enough.”

Stone, Statue, Salt, Echo

Echo becomes stone in the myth—a calcified silence, a body transmuted into rock. Andrea returns to stone differently: she performs with the marble statues of myth she loves—Dionysus, Aphrodite, Hermaphroditus. Impossible bodies. She bends, twists, contorts, attempting to mirror their cold perfection. The emulation always fails, and in failure she blooms.

A meeting with the Sleeping Hermaphroditus at the Borghese: marble flesh reclining on marble bed, body and bed materially undifferentiated yet energetically distinct. Above, a ceiling of mythic merger. Andrea folds posture into posture until presence itself becomes durational performance. In this meeting, subject and object intra-act: not inert matter and gazing subject, but a co-constituted resonance. Form calls and answers across stone and flesh. The encounter overwhelms, saturating the room.

What else is folded into this encounter? Who else? What is erased that Andrea is striving to excavate?

Ovid frames the merger of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus as punishment: feminine desire coded as predation, masculine beauty defiled, their resulting fusion rendered an abomination.

Both and neither. Freak.

The myth polices desire itself: Salmacis is monstrous for wanting, Hermaphroditus monstrous for being wanted, and the merged body is narrated as lack.

You must not want, you must not refuse, you must not spill.

Each posture in Andrea’s folding ritual is a refusal of Ovid’s script. She searches for and exhumes Salmacis from the marble, dances her erasure. In Andrea’s hands the merger is not violation but a deep grief-desire that exceeds the punitive myth-making.

Andrea asks: “How many bodies can I be?” The institutional statue suggests perfection, a single body frozen forever, with Salmacis interred, erased. But Andrea’s body resists this singularity. She fails to become marble, and in this failure discovers the truth of embodiment: the body is not seen, the body is felt. The body vibrates within.

Ahmed suggests that embodied experiences—the texture of an encounter, an incident, a happening—can provide flashes of insight, that “theory can do more the closer it gets to the skin.” (Ahmed, 2006). Andrea’s marble encounters do exactly this: the strain of emulation, the detail of posture, the shiver of overwhelm becomes knowledge in and through the body.

Theory stays close to the skin in all of Andrea’s encounters with seeing and being seen. To think at and with the skin, to lean into sensation—prickling, shivering, blushing, sweating, crying—is to allow knowledge to arise from the press of encounters rather than from abstraction. Meaning is carried not in clarity and detail, but in blur, texture and porosity. In Andrea’s work meaning is formed in and through the affective pressure of lived moments, not by abstracting those moments into something universal and smooth.

Shimmer Body

We are mobile constellations.

To live differently is to live beside oneself: outside the boundary of the one body, the self-contained subject. Andrea’s work insists that the body is never singular, always plural, partial and unfinished.

The questions bears repeating: “How many bodies can I be?” The question is not rhetorical; it is ontological. Each performance an attempt, an iteration that carries difference, not a replica but a shimmer-double—another body flickering into being, not the same as before, but also not entirely other. Provisional, refusing to settle.

The answer: always more than one, never just one.

The so-called “real body” is what the eye disciplines into outline and category. The shimmer body unsettles this real, refusing singular fact in favour of oscillation, hinge, slip. It does not appear in the ocular field but flickers elsewhere—in the affective register, where bodies double. Double double. Here the “I” quivers, unspeakable in its intensity, stuttering in language, knocking the machine until another register breaks through.

The shimmer body holds a thousand bodies without breaking because affect gathers rather than fragments. Multiplicity coheres as intensity: one tremor setting off another in infinite vibration. Andrea’s work shows the body as transmission, not representation. Not “who I am” fixed in an image, but “what I feel” and “how I am felt.”

To shimmer is to dwell in the glitch, the ditch, the hyphen, the oscillation that no eye, no marble can contain.

Myth as Trans

Echo more than voice, Narcissus more than image. The mythic and cautionary tale was one of scarcity, of love withheld. Transness interrupts this logic. In a world that withholds recognition and love, and characterises transness by a metric of lack, transness find love elsewhere—in self-recognition, chosen families, affective bonds. In images and myths. Love doesn’t disappear; it shifts registers, and in shifting it multiplies. This is love not as scarcity but as overflow: body as abundance, boundaries dissolving into singular-plural. Myth becomes technique, a pool of becoming rather than a mirror of being.

Through this lens, the Narcissus myth is no warning but a model of recursive self-affirmation. Echo becomes echo, Narcissus becomes flower, sweet water crystallises, Hermaphroditus becomes merger. Each so-called loss yields abundance, not absence. In this context Andrea’s practice of looking and being looked at, of serial auto-portraiture is a recursive study in self-love. The embodiment of abundance. A multiplication of felt selves.

Andrea lives this logic. Andrea is marble. Andrea is dancer. Andrea is glitch. Andrea is pink-dressed, arcing, crying salt tears in the back of an uber, eating, sleeping, dancing in the rain, loving her friends. Each iteration fails, flowers, remains fertile. What documentation cannot capture becomes the very site of transmutation: the ineffable not solved but dwelt in. Each iteration carries residue without closure. Dissolution yields form otherwise.

Surveillance as Auto-poeisis

Surveillance is a myth of scarcity: the eye that withholds recognition, the camera that captures to constrain. Andrea reroutes this apparatus as double agent. In the looking, she bypasses categorisation and seeks something else. A flicker, a blur, an impossible body. These she dives into, deeper and deeper, ultimately seeking an origin point that undoes her utterly. In her installations screens glitch as they look at themselves, looking at her. Livestreams loop, looking at you looking at her. Watchers are implicated, the gaze caught in a recursive mirror. There is no looking away.

Her relentless practice of self-documentation—video portraits, fragments, livestreams, collected detritus—is myth-making. Each image is both archive and fiction. Each auto-portrait an event, a contract of looking. Documentation does not secure truth; it generates legend. This is auto-theory in its most literal sense: theory written from and on the body, wrung out in a becoming without end.

Andrea works in the ditch, exploits the paradox of transfemme imaging: the eye that injures also delivers. The ocular wound becomes aperture. What was meant as capture begins to leak. What was meant to withhold becomes generative. Watchers are drawn in, but what they see-feel is not legibility, not an answer to who Andrea is. What they encounter is iterative love in a proliferating body. They witness all the Andrea-selves shimmer their way out of containment.

In a practice of disidentification Andrea uses the very forms that would fix her—bending them toward diffraction, toward becoming.

The Gooey Commons

I want to fabricate environments where the separation of subject/object is as dissolved as possible – where we can all get overwhelmed together and become this gooey mess. This mass/mess – despite all our differences resisting the dissolution, this integration… (Illés, 2025)

To enter Andrea’s world is to be overwhelmed. Containment is anathema to her existence. She is sticky self-love, and you will be too—caught in an affective web of Andrea-goo.

The goo is hapticality: the feel of being-together before subjects harden into selves, or the thing that happens when selves leak, lose integrity, lose names and language. It is the undercommons of sensation, a sociality that touches without asking for identification. Where the visual insists on countable individuals, goo insists on contact—on one or many or a zero—the unmeasurable mess that refuses to be tallied.

Audiences might close down, cry, dissolve while resisting the liquefaction. All are implicated in the mess. From stone to salt to goo: hardness liquefies into collective medium. What might feel like assimilation is actually a commons of abundance. A collective body vibrating with affect. The connections are undeniable.

The goo is a redemptive embrace.

Echo vibrates, Narcissus flickers, Salmacis and Hermaphroditus merge, Andrea morphs. We arrive at ourselves—again and again, in endless, sticky, impossible return.

LOVE EACH OTHER