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“Where is it that you are going?“

The joy we find in films (and art overall) starts first and foremost as fascination with feelings and thoughts and images that pop up in our minds before they are complete, before our time with the work is over. It’s an unformed but powerful ethereal piece we own ourselves in a space of our mind. We hope to finds a complete picture around to finish that powerful, partly formed thought into something bigger, something more true… something that means something real and truer and… more felt, than what we see and feel around us in the reality we know.

Films are and have always been frame for escapism to us all, but for queer folk such as I, there is rarely a perfect reflection of us and our experiences. We find ourselves having to project and find those reflections in the things that don’t seem to fit with the rest of the people around us or the laser focus of the narratives at hand. If we do find depictions of us in most media, as our existence is still demonized and repressed in mainstream media, we are often seen as the killers, the deserving victims, the odd side people, the creatures and monsters and oddest oddballs in those pieces of mass viewable arts.

Somehow we feel a kinship to much of it, despite the demonizations. Yet we rarely do we have a whole piece centered around our feelings and existence, so we instead piece one together from what we can contextually call ours that we see parts of ourselves scattered throughout in direct and abstract ways.

It is hard to feel fully projected into many pieces of art where we are simply not even a thought, or worse, a token. We cannot rid our sense of self outside the frame if we do not find all the pieces in a way that makes sense to us. So often we see aspects and opportunities for ourselves to project into and try our best to find a way to make sense of it that matches our feelings. We want to feel the thrills, joys and the little deaths of ourselves outside of ourselves so that we may understand ourselves and live more joyfully. More connected to the world we inhabit that rejects us, buries us and hides us away.

Art can be so many different things so why can’t we just interpret it to our whims and wills as we see fit? Queer reading of horror being probably the most common for us, as a lot of queer existence is a series of horrors of being seen, targeted, rejected or having to deal with great amount of violence. But our need to understand ourselves through works that haven’t made space for us has also turned so many of us into academics first and cooled our feelings and cores and sense of escapism in a way that our fellow people on earth do not contend with. We so rarely get to enter something without having to see our pain and repression reflected and read that we can start to grow numb to art if the joys start being outweighed by the need to understand and make sense of what doesn’t attempt to depict and understand us. We increasingly feel dissatisfied that those easier readings we came across at first are now so far and few between when we have depictions that do not understand or get us but want to profit off us.

And I think Camp Miasma understands that we can just BE our messy endlessly forming self in a messy understanding of what we transplant ourselves into, as long as we feel some joy and truth and texture in the projection. We project ourselves onto the screen, just like the light that flickers those images. We don’t get there by knowing the trivia, or analyzing the themes to their fullness, there has to be at least a bit of ambiguity or scope too vast to boil it all down to one idea or emotion. We get transported by simply feeling. We cannot find something if we aren’t a bit lost first. The magic is getting lost in it, to feel a version of you die while passing through it and returning from it changed, happier, truer, more open to the world.

It is an indulgent film that asks you to indulge.

Interpret what you want as long as it brings you some joy and truth and comfort. Little Death in Camp Miasma is an orgasm, a genderqueer revenge fantasy, a camera, a ventilation-based slasher killer, a spiral INTO a fantasy where ecstasy overwhelms and blood spraying to the sky is equal to orgasms towards the heavens brought on by repression and death. Sex is death of self and death is sex. The film is constantly trying to never be pigeonholed as one genre, one idea, one kind of experience or interpretation. It defies it all so YOU CAN MAKE OF IT WHAT YOU WILL LIKE ALL ART SHOULD. IT EXISTS FOR ITSELF AND IT’S CREATOR TO BE WHAT WAS INTENDED BUT YOU TAKE FROM IT WHAT YOU WILL.

All of it means whatever you want it to mean, all you need to ask of yourself and your experience with art is to give yourself to it, to feel something real and true and projected back and forth between it and yourself. You don’t have to intellectualize it or justify your feelings. Allow yourself to feel before you think. Allow yourself to die a thousand deaths and be born anew. Art is a safe space for you to exist and be projected into, you don’t have to justify to anyone why or how you find yourself in it.

Kris is repressed but curious and capable of great joy and feelings but needs guidance of someone who gets what it is to live to truly find what joy, art and sex can be. Presley creates art for art’s sake, she takes great pleasures in all communication and the art she has cultivated, no matter if problematic or not. She embraces sincere existence and letting yourself be transplanted into something beyond yourself and putting your whole self into the world without apologizing. She guides Kris toward the possibilities of just feeling and transplanting and finding YOUR joy in wherever you find yourself. She is a guide who let’s Kris be lost and found by herself.

After finding out I was trans I repressed it for years. Years! My true trans existence and sexuality did not actually emerge until I had seen it reflected again and again in bits of art here and there with little to no connection to one another, and all of it in titles found myself getting lost in as much as I found myself in. There was no other place to find the gender euphoria I needed to know was possible. Art found me and I found me in art.

I strive to keep finding more of myself and the joys of the world in art, where every work can be a door and my eyes and ears the keys to what truths and joys live beyond what I can currently see. Since starting my truest journey with art, I have been able to share those joys, truths and findings with the people around me, offering opportunities to get lost but with some guidance through my words and contextualization if people seek those out as well.

I have been watching films, playing games and sharing in TV shows with my girlfriend now for almost a year and there is no greater joy to be found in art than sharing it with her.

Sharing in what is so specifically on point that you can put it into words and what you can’t. Culminating in the feelings, the moments together where you’re in sync emotionally with what is in front of you both, the imagery and sounds that seems to capture YOU and THEM no matter if you’re experiencing it together or apart. She has found sides of herself through some of the media I’ve connected to with all my being and I have found sides of myself through hers in the same way. We share in all the ways one can share with another. Watching her watching, her watching me watching, feeling her feeling, feeling her joys and connections and emotional heights, no matter if it’s with a film in front of us, show continuing episode by episode, music vibrating our bodies as we look into each other’s eyes, holding a controller or wrapping our hands around one another, we share in something only the two of us can. We are art and we share in art and we are more whole and happier for having found one another through art.

We say to one another often ‘þitt er mitt og mitt er þitt’. What’s yours is mine and what’s mine is yours. All of it is equally real, she experiences where I experienced certain awakenings, sides of myself and I get to see all of that in her and she gets to see all of that in me through hers. We are also doing all of this as our true selves, our transitioning selves who are experiencing a lot of things truly as ourselves for the first time in our lives and so even if we have had certain experiences before with other people and with ourselves, they become wholly different and true and more powerful when shared with someone who gets you to your core and sees the real you for everything you are. We are each other’s that someone who let’s you be your true, vulnerable self, no matter what.

We are solving one another’s puzzles by sharing our pieces, we fit new pieces together, experiences and thoughts form more fully together. We are more ourselves together and were brought together by the joy of each other’s joy for art and each other’s expression that became our own art.

Art can make you whole, it can transplant you into anything. You see the real you in it for the first time and the truest truths about yourself and the world in there as well. You can try to analyze it all to understand it better, but you’ll never understand it as fully or powerfully as you feel it.

So let yourself feel all those scattered thoughts when you dive into art, let yourself spiral into something bigger than yourself, and most importantly share that version of yourself you find with the world, because that need to get lost and come out reborn as a better, truer, more joyful you, will always come back.

Your existence is truth of the art that finds its way into your heart, so make it a joyful one.

And one last thing to my world, that most important puzzle piece that I have found on the other side of all the art I have experienced til now. The one I will experience so much more with and find greater joys and truths alongside:

I love you, Alexa mín.