Enzo Iwase & Xtina Vargas

“The earth is trembling. Systems of thought have been demolished, and there are no more straight paths. There are endless floods, eruptions, earthquakes, fires....Trembling thinking is the instinctual feeling that we must refuse all categories of fixed and imperial thought.”

—Édouard Glissant

I always think about how small of a gesture might gag us—how something small, so seemingly insignificant, can hold the entire weight of the world. How all the untitled supremacies of the world can be felt in an inflection or diversity centric ad. In the minutiae of a fried image. It’s this sense of fragility and transformation that guides the work, this uneasy but thrilling relationship to what is to be seen and unseen. What it means to move through the world as subject and operator, as rendered and rendering.

The structures we inherit, the codes we’re bound by, don’t just live in policy or abstraction. They shape our gait, our syntax, our thresholds for pleasure and recognition. And in your work, these forces aren’t just observed—they’re bent, broken, torqued and twerked. It doesn't seek to escape the system, nor do you submit to it. You perform it until it trembles. You stylize it until it glitches. Until it fags out. Until it transitions racially. Re-presented as a discarded fragment of culture botched together. It’s a complex negotiation of power, identity, and presence. While navigating the world’s relentless self destructive tendencies.

I keep thinking of Juliana Huxtable’s line: an experiment in posing alternate ways of conjugating myself. That’s the nowness I see in your practice: tourettic, erotic, profane, beautiful. A poetics of latency, of contingency, of proximity. Not clarity, but smear. Not arrival, but becoming. The self blurred through heat and pressure. The nowness here is both erotic and political. A body in motion. Trembling before the other.

Your work doesn’t offer answers. It doesn’t resolve. It hovers at the threshold—impressionistic, half-legible. As felt knowledge. It invites us to sit in the tremble. To feel the structure before dismantling it. To witness the subwoofer shove the body into ecstatic collectivity. To know the petrosexual, the artifact, the camouflage. To trace the cameras flashing at libidinal BPMs.

These works move through the world as stunt doubles. Slipping into roles. Performing the impact. Getting hit in your place. Making it look real.

—Jesus Morales