The Darkroom I, 90min, 25th October 2024, The Basement, The Gallery of Urban Symbolism, Margate.
The Darkroom II, 45min, 1st April 2025, The Library, The Margate School, Margate.
The Darkroom performances and their resulting Rat-o-gram Relics tap into a growing cultural movement of people who are questioning institutional religion but still seeking spiritual meaning. The performances & their relics align with the rise of deconstructionist theology, progressive spirituality, and the rejection of binary structures. As audiences worldwide navigate religious trauma, spiritual evolution, and non-binary identities, the work provides a healing and alternative sacred space.
The collaboration between Saint, the bodies of Egon and Schiele The Rats, and The Monk is a first step in the funerary rites of The Rats one of whose death was the catalyst to Saint meeting their fully formed Monk homunculus. They set about creating unification in a Christian & Buddhist ceremony so that The Rats would be ready for ascension.
Using the defrosting cadavers of The Rats to make Rat-o-gram relics their bodies were immortalised in a peaceful state. The Darkroom I was held in the The Basement, Margate, where Saint was attached to a large wooden cruciform via noose. Staging the giving of their own life to free their beloved rats, the self sacrificial offering intended to set The Rat's souls free. The ninety minute performance embodied Christ’s passion and the Buddhist Bodhisattvas who work toward the enlightenment of all beings, not just themselves in an interfaith unification.
The Monk blessed the ceremony throughout with throat sang chants and a Tibetan rendition of The Lords Prayer in the style of a Russian Orthodox Choir and the multiple apparitions of life-like fur appearing on the rat-o-gram bodies leads naturally to the assumption of Divine intervention at work through Saint who states,
This should have been impossible.
The bodies were solid opaque objects.
In 1775 two alchemists, Kufstein, and the Italian mystic and Rosicrucian cleric Geloni, created a series of ten homunculi. Two of these were non-corporeal until chanted to. One of the jars was known as The Monk and was accidentally dropped killing its humanoid inhabitant.
Have I reformed The Monk who is now chanting the non-corporeal back to life?
The Darkroom II was a forty-five minute Rat-o-gram relic making ceremony. Their bodies already unified, the performance focused on the making of The Rat-o-gram Relics. Six were made, each body alone and together twice, as if one trinity was not enough. The Monk produced a new solemn drone score and practiced durational throat singing.
The ceremony ended with the hanging of five of the Rat-o-grams leading into a silent knelt prayer with the bodies, candle and final Rat-o-gram before a candle-lit procession out of the space holding the now defrosted bodies of Egon and Schiele.