Close Look

Toward a Queer Ontology: Adham Faramawy’s Skin Flick

By Elisabetta Garletti

First comes the sound of crickets. Then, a story.

The artist, a monstrous creature with horn-like prosthetics sticking out of their forehead, recounts the memory of an intimate encounter. Out in the open, enveloped by nature, they recall the image of two bodies splayed on a lawn, “coiled, ready to jump into action like the insects.” A crackling sound and the skin on their face expands, deforms, becoming a fertile ground for the sprouting of digitally-rendered mushrooms. Where does the human body end and vegetation begin? Can we still talk about the separation between the natural and the artificial in the age of hyperreality? These are only some of the questions that Adham Faramawy’s 13-minute video Skin Flick (2019) poses to its viewers.

Fusing recorded images with digital editing effects and CGI renderings of plants, fruits, flowers, and fungi, Faramawy’s work challenges the separation between reality and artifice, between the natural and the technical. The screen acts as a second skin: it appears to fold, twist, and bend following the movement of the bodies it portrays. A close-up shows a man crumpling the skin on his face. Through digital manipulation, the screen’s surface creases following his gestures, which are accompanied by the strident sound of fingers rubbing against a screen. The human and the digital stand in a symbiotic relationship. We exist as electronic signals, our skin a combination of pixels, while images acquire a tactile dimension. The artist invites us to reflect on the question of agency in representation: What kind of agency do we have over the visual mediation of our bodies? How do images influence the way in which we construct ourselves?

It is through screens that we are consumed and consume the image of others. The title of the work, Skin Flick, an ironic reference to the pornography industry, points at the dynamics of desire and pleasure that are at play in visual representation. The artist appropriates and parodies the language and aesthetics of beauty tutorials and advertising to explore how visual culture influences self-stylisation, by packaging and selling a certain kind of appearance as normative and desirable. The work addresses the obsession with self-care that ubiquitously resonates across contemporary media culture. Different characters alternate on screen, mostly men. Caught in an erotic frenzy of self-care, they continuously smear their bodies with creams, foams, and ointments. The rhythmic and musical cadence of Faramawy’s voiceover describing their actions echoes the hypnotic discourse of advertising. The assonances in their speech—“foaming, frothing, fizzing”—add to the sense of viscerality and liquidity. Language is haptic. What does self-care mean when it is played out on masculine bodies? A still frame shows a man flexing while spraying some shaving cream onto his armpit in what appears to be a pun on cosmetic advertising for men, where acts of self-grooming are often “counterbalanced” by displays of hypermasculinity. Then three men in statuesque poses, recalling the Three Graces, pour liquids onto one another, frothing each other’s skin with foam, the fluids mixing and the substances passing from one body onto another in a sensual exchange. The account shifts from desire to revulsion as Faramawy’s character recalls the painful memory of their lover spitting on them and their discomfort with bodily fluids. Liquids can be vehicles of self-care, healing, signifiers of pleasure—but they can also be sources of harm, contamination, and disgust.

Bodies cover themselves with fruit extract, vanilla milk toner, and hazelnut-scented creams. One wonders whether the reference to natural components in chemical cosmetics is intended to make their production and consumption more legitimate, more appealing. The border between health and toxicity is collapsed. Faramawy’s treatment of remedies recalls the original sense of the Greek word pharmakon, meaning both poison and cure. The consumerist body is a pathologized body, enticed to embark on an endless quest for healing and improvement, but the promise of a cure can turn out to be a poison in disguise. Aging has been historically framed as a disease, a tradition that continues in media culture’s obsession with youth and the concealment of the signs of aging. Already in Hippocratic-Galenic medicine, founded on the interaction of four elements—hot, moist, cold, and dry—aging was perceived as an illness, a progressive cooling and drying of the body, that had to be supplemented through heat and moisture. Does this strike a chord? In the work, Faramawy’s character confesses feeling increasingly ill at ease with their aging body, a process that they try to reverse through a “self-prescribed HRT plan,” commonly a menopausal treatment. They experiment with supplements and drugs, but the consequences only make things worse: they experience heat rashes, itching, the feeling of something crawling underneath their skin. They describe the side effects caused by self-administered Tamoxifen, a drug commonly used for the treatment of breast cancer, that caused their chest to develop and their nipples to seep milk. Gender assumptions are thus dismantled. The work explores the potential of drugs to undermine the conception of gender as biologically determined. Drugs become means to challenge the physical attributes conventionally linked to ideas of masculinity and femininity, contaminating, in the words of transgender philosopher Paul B. Preciado, “the molecular bases of the production of sexual difference.”¹ Skin Flick shows us a body that can morph and mutate, challenging notions of the biological body as a “natural,” unchangeable given.

In Faramawy’s work, the human experience mingles with the vegetal, the bacterial, the animal. Skin Flick speaks of a desire to transcend the confines of the human body, to tear out one’s flesh and inhabit different forms of being. The subtitles on screen silently reveal the artist’s yearning: “Stretched out like a Sphinx, I wish I could feel new forms of touch and taste, I wish I could take on the parts of other animals, insects, simulate their processes, see through their eyes. I wish I could choose my form and that it could be monstrous.” Faramawy advocates for an ontology of fluidity: they claim the right to choose which body to inhabit, the power to determine their physical form and not be determined by it. The Sphinx, a mythological creature made up of human and animal parts, becomes the symbol of such a longing for a trans-species existence. The artist expresses a desire to multiply, to morph, to disperse and inhabit different life forms: “I wish I could spread my consciousness out through a root system. Mycelial, like a fungus.” Categories are overthrown in the embrace of a rhizomatic way of living that recalls Donna Haraway’s vision of an existence based on multi-species alliances, her image of companion species linked together in a game of string figures.²

The fluid aesthetics of Faramawy’s work challenges categorical distinctions and suggests the possibility of a queer taxonomy, however oxymoronic the expression might sound. In this new form of classification, categories are constantly questioned, dismantled, or reformed, privileging connections rather than separations. Alliances between different categories of being are established in the name of queerness. At one point in the video, we learn about the Buddleja (davidii), a hermaphroditic plant native to China, considered as an invasive species in most countries of the Global North. This botanical reference points to the reproduction of racial and sexual discriminations even in the seeming objectivity of scientific discourse. We also learn about the Pyura Chilensis, a marine invertebrate that changes gender throughout the course of its existence. Born male, it becomes hermaphroditic at puberty and is capable of asexual reproduction, producing both sperm and eggs. The examination of sexualities outside of an anthropocentric vision reveals the faults and exclusions of a hegemonic, heteronormative logic, and the possibility to reform systems of values in the name of ubiquitous queerness.

A beating sound announces the denouement of the work: bodies covered in foam twist and bend, becoming almost indistinguishable from one another. The surface of the screen bends with them, while their image is layered with digital renderings of mushrooms, lichens, and mold stains. The work finally fulfills the desire to inhabit a borderless, multi-species body. Faramawy’s voiceover is silenced and replaced by written text, as if the screen was now speaking on their behalf: “I wish my desires were more vegetal, fungal.” The human body merges with plants, chemicals, technological apparatuses. Faramawy imagines their arms and hands, spread out to embrace the sky, replaced by screens showing Cindy Crawford drinking Pepsi. The economy of consumption is inescapable, we are products of it. From the utopian desire of an idyllic synthesis with nature, suddenly the discourse shifts to decomposition: they imagine cola rotting in their gut, pesticides polluting the waters, plastic bags, bottles, cans, containers, packaging “floating like a city in the ocean.” The process comes full circle: first production, then consumption, and finally waste. What was marketed as nourishing and healing for the human body has rendered it toxic, another contaminant.

Faramawy imagines their rotting body decomposing and being metabolised by the earth, releasing the toxins accumulated over a lifetime. The subtitles convey a sense of rejection: “It doesn’t feel right, your body mingling with mine. Your white teeth spill benzene, pores oozing freon. My body shouldn’t be this toxic.” We are left to wonder whether the text is still conveying Faramawy’s thoughts, or whether it is the voice of the earth that is now emerging in a refusal to absorb their body. However, new life can sprout from decay. As Jennifer Hamilton and Astrida Neimanis remind us, composting can be an act of care and attention, an ethical process of sharing and solidarity whereby waste can be turned into nutrient-rich new soil.³ The work ends on a hopeful note, with the fantasy of being buried in a fruitful earth, the body a nourishing substance, growing and changing into different life forms, living on as “an apple tree in an orchard of apple trees.”

1. Paul B. Preciado, Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era (New York: The Feminist Press, 2013), p. 142

2. Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulecene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), p. 10

3. Jennifer Mae Hamilton and Astrida Neimanis, “Composting Feminisms and Environmental Humanities,” Environmental Humanities, 10:2 (2018): 501–527.

Elisabetta Garletti is a PhD candidate in the Department of History of Art at the University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on gender representation in contemporary moving image art.