Tessel Brühl: Freeing Sexuality
Naturally, I’m an optimist. This might be because, as a general dilettante, I know nothing about real terror or because, as an artist and designer, I have the possibility to create little sunrays in the darkest places and shape the world around me as I wish.
I have started a new project recently, and here in the Salon I will give you an insight in my Universe. The topic I am working on right now is sexuality. By bringing this topic from everyday life to the fictional realm of my Universe I create space. Space to research how sexuality functions now and to create new ways how it could possibly function in the future. We must understand that in order to be able to celebrate sexuality in the future, we have to free her from the evil villains of today. Evil villains such as inequality, male privilege and objectification.
With the Lure suits for example, I started to research how we project our identity onto ourselves like a second skin. But what happens when this second skin is a digital one? In Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games, or MMORPG’s, you can still see a form of male privilege where men who have a female avatar are being helped more than women with a male or female avatar. In unisex clothing, like the beautiful Bonne Suits, we use casual men’s clothing to dress both men and women. This way men and women are equal, but desexualized. I would like to see if there are ways to use tight women’s clothing to dress both men and women and by doing so accentuate their sexuality. Unisex becomes hypersex. Objectification isn’t necessarily only negative. Look at FANBOY3000, where my boyfriend became my biggest fan. Playing with gender and identity in an even more liquid way. I don’t want to neutralize the gender spectrum, but I want to stretch it even further and preferably in 3D.
On to the future and beyond. The future is Supersexy!