As a filmmaker, installation artist, and poet, P. Staff draws from a wide-ranging assortment of inspirations, materials, and settings, of which recent examples include Achille Mbembe’s theory of necropolitics, affect theory, the transpoetics of writers such as Che Gossett and Eva Hayward, as well as their own studies in modern dance, astrology, and end of life care. In Staff’s interdisciplinary practice, these varying threads serve to emphasise the processes by which bodies – especially those of people who are queer, trans, or disabled – are interpreted, regulated, and disciplined in a rigorously controlled society. The video installation On Venus (2019) continues Staff’s examination of the exchange between bodies, ecosystems, and institutions from a queer and trans perspective. Set above a mirrored floor flooded with radioactive yellow light, the moving images are comprised of warped footage documenting the industrial farming of commodities including urine, semen, meat, skins, and fur. The video’s second half includes a poem describing life on the planet Venus, a sibling to Earth but one described as a state of non-life or near-death, a queer state of being that is volatile and in constant metamorphosis. Staff’s work ultimately depicts states of violence that underpin the making of a human subject, inquiring what is at stake in the making of livable futures.
Madeline Weisburg
