Collagen Cult

Collagen Cult began as a dream fragment: a brief, visceral image of raw meat laid across my face to increase collagen—an absurd, intimate ritual of self-making. That dream became the project’s first transmission, a clue toward building a performance practice where ritual is both medium and method, and where trans shamanism emerges through acts that hover between parody, healing, and insurgency.

The project merges choreographed movement, costuming, and digital cinema to ask: How do we metabolize the voices that colonize the body? From the beginning, I understood this work as an inversion of Olympia: rather than recirculating the binary of white woman / racialized servant, Collagen Cult generates a pyramid of affect, a sorority of three women—myself, Luz Tobar, and Jiayi Liang—each carrying a mask (Animal, Plant, Mineral) that scaffolds a shared transmission. Together, we form a triangulated antenna through which the project’s signals can speak.

Two major sonic and textual lineages haunt the work:

  1. First: Hanoi Hannah, whose wartime broadcasts slipped under consciousness like psychic shrapnel. Her femme voice—strategic, seductive—functions in this project as ancestral circuitry, a reminder that the speaker can be both weapon and world-builder.

  2. Second: the Irish injury testimonials from Allen Feldman’s Breaker’s Yard, whose voices activate the body as archive of conflict, the wound as a lucid aperture that invites repair.

Collagen becomes both material metaphor and critique. It reflects the elasticity of women’s friendships, the cultic demands of beauty culture, and the emotional labor required to keep the body coherent under pressure.

Across performance and video, I pursue what I call femme telepathy—the capacity of trans, migrant, and colonized bodies to act as conduits for hidden information, grief, and desire.

In the end, Collagen Cult frames the transfeminine body not as spectacle but as ritual technology: a site where hauntings are metabolized, sorority becomes signal, and the dream-image becomes the first doorway into revelation.