Ethics of Visibility and the Responsibility of Looking. An Interview with Cassils Between Darkness, Fire, and Retinal Archives
Between darkness, fire, and “archives” imprinted on the retina, the Canadian artist rethinks the body as a somatic instrument and a field of resistance: a dialogue on the politics of visibility and the responsibility of looking.
Link to the Italian version on Artribune
Ethics of Visibility and the Responsibility of Looking. An Interview with Cassils Between Darkness, Fire, and Retinal Archives
I have never approached the interview as a simple extraction of quotations. I am interested in it when it becomes a reading device: when questions do not chase a definition, but open a grammar. How a work is built, what conditions it puts into play, what it makes possible, and what it refuses. That is where the force of an artwork can be measured: not only in what it asserts, but in what it compels us to reconsider through the act of looking.
Cassils (1975, Montreal, Canada) works across performance, photography, film, sound, and sculpture. In this dialogue, each response returns to the “how” before the “what”: how presence is produced, how a condition is chosen, how documentation is handled, how an institution is traversed without being absorbed by it. What emerges is not a formula, but a trajectory that tests, question after question, the responsibility of seeing.
Rereading these pages as I rewrote them in Italian, I noticed a detail that surprised me: I did not feel the need to fix gender through the schwa (ə). Perhaps because, without realizing it, I avoided letting that mark become too tight a frame. Or perhaps because Cassils’ work asks for breath: a trust in form, in its wholeness, to restore a humanity that refuses reduction.
Interview by Antonino La Vela
As an artist, what is the climate like for living and working in the United States today?
This country is a disaster right now. The tension is extremely high. And yet everyday life keeps going, at least for some people. I teach, and I work every day with many international students. So I ask myself: what does it mean to apply pressure, to dissent, to do politics, when you see students taken away by force? How do you teach what you believe in and, at the same time, keep students safe?
Today, how do you define your body in your work: material, collaborator, or site?
I think of my body as an instrument, a somatic instrument. I believe there is an inherent wisdom in the body, often placed behind the intellect. And the body is also a powerful barometer of the sociopolitical moment: it registers many subconscious sensations that the mind cannot grasp.
In your work, the word “presence” feels like a discipline, not a concept. In Inextinguishable Fire the risk is real. What happens, mentally and physically, in those seconds when form coincides with survival?
It is a state of total presence. I think of nothing except being there, one hundred percent, in that instant. You have to be radically present. It lasts about twenty-five seconds, the length of an exhale. If you inhale while you are on fire, you burn your throat.
You have spoken about meditation as perceptual training. I am interested in this invisible part of the work, because it is often where form is born. What does it give you, concretely, when you work with vulnerability and control?
I can feel food digesting in the intestines, blood moving through the veins. You see in real time how pain becomes pleasure and pleasure becomes pain. And you perceive the impermanence of all things, including somatic and mental states.
A decisive part of your practice is the obscuring of the body: ice, fire, darkness. In a system that wants to see everything, why did you choose subtraction rather than offering?
From very early on in my practice, I chose to obscure the body. The reception of nudity felt frustrating and limiting. For me, obscuring is tied to the politics of visibility, especially when the gaze on the trans body is so scrutinizing and when it is not safe to be seen.
In Becoming an Image you move the work into the spectator’s body. When vision becomes responsibility, what do you want to happen to the person who looks?
The eyes receive a kind of retinal burn and a living photograph forms inside the spectator’s body. You become the custodian of this archive.
In a time when visibility can become a target, how do you avoid the work being read only through an identitarian grid?
It is more important than ever to name oneself as such, to insist on a kind of existence. But then the work has to remain larger than that grid: identity manifests in the works I make, it is not the sum of me.
The politics of the medium: that is where what remains and what is consumed gets decided. You say documentation is not neutral. Why?
Media are not neutral. What you include in the frame and what you decide to exclude are choices. Documentation is part of the work.
There is a point many institutions prefer not to discuss: money, reputation, cover. When you realize an institution is turning your presence into an image device, what is the sharp thought that snaps into place, the first sentence that crosses you?
When a work is sold, I always set it up so that a percentage of the proceeds goes back to a community-rooted organization, a grassroots reality working on the ground. I am talking about people who operate every day in direct contact with others, with concrete and often urgent needs: support, protection, assistance, mutual aid, network. It is a way to ensure that the value generated by art does not remain sealed inside institutional or market circuits, but produces a real effect where pressure is actually felt.
If you had to condense into one sentence what your work asks of the contemporary gaze, what would it be?
When visibility is not safe, the question is no longer what to show, but what conditions make looking possible. That is why I look for formal solutions that destabilize the act of seeing itself and make its politics, its weight, evident.
In a time of crisis and real urgency, what’s the greatest risk when art tries to become political action?
For me, the risk is losing touch with the needs of the people I’m trying to support. That’s why it’s essential to seek guidance, to truly listen to those who are directly affected, and to use whatever platforms we have to amplify their voices. And there’s something else art can do, too: find moments of imagination and invention even in times of extreme constraint. Even under authoritarianism, even when certain lives are being erased, I still believe art can offer a creative, tactical response.
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