Frisson: French for aesthetic chills or psychogenic shivers, a response to rewarding stimuli that often induces a pleasurable state, fleeting sensation, ecstatic euphoria, and orgasmic chills down the spine that could instill fear or bliss.

Frisson is a study in time and space, exploring our bodies, identities, and corresponding relationships with diverse societies. Informed by queer history, identity theory, and marginalized experiences, we are constructing an imagined world and self while simultaneously illuminating existing traditions – positioning ourselves fluidly between the past, present, and future. We are holding space for reflection in our communities, interrogation of traumas, and speculation: new intimacies. In our processes, we individually explore embodying and autonomizing both personal and collective cultural narratives.

Confronting the perceptions of the queer and POC body, we look towards the perennially present scenes we inhabit: the underground, subterranean subcultures, clubs spotlighting Chicago house music, dance music, and trans junglists – these (in)visible grounds for a bodily celebration, sex, fantasy, hapticality, safety, and myriad identities. We flaunt it, dance with it, work to preserve it, and show it on our own terms, free from co-opt or the supposed validation of the systems that sought to infiltrate these spaces in the first place. We embrace the abject, reclaiming and reframing notions of shame, rejection, and tropes. 

We invite the viewer to participate in these explorations in our use of video, sound, sculpture, and installation – allowing them to project themselves into the utopias and immersive ritual spaces we create. Our individual explorations of love, exchange, and fellowship echo the scholarship of Halberstam in The Undercommons, and our works converge to realize the project of Undercommons living – to generate a borderless interrelation that reaches beyond normative modes of moving and navigating a world that is regulated by empire. Ultimately, Frisson is an attempt to connect with these other selves to process our relationship to power, to queerness, to gender, to sexuality, to oppression through a decolonial, afrofuturist, neodesi, diasporic lens.