Except the bloodline

Suspended between social taboo and sensationalist exploitation, between psychiatrization and moral judgment, suicidal desire remains confined within a tightly circumscribed imaginary. It is difficult to articulate it in terms that move beyond fear or prohibition.

“Every suicidal person is always alive and desiring,” states Alegría Gobeil in their first solo work. Except the Bloodline unfolds at the edge of body art, as the artist allows themself to be traversed by a multiplicity of suicidal figures.These figures split, proliferate and multiply. They contaminate one another in a chain of unstable reiterations, ultimately dissolving any fixed notion of origin—medical, biographical, historical, or fictional. These figures split, proliferate and multiply. They contaminate one another in a chain of unstable reiterations, ultimately dissolving any fixed notion of origin—medical, biographical, historical, or fictional. The artist’s body becomes an assemblage, the site of an embodied investigation in which a saturated, repetitive, densely referential, and deliberately excessive text stages the fantasies, clichés, and anxieties that structure the experience of the suicidal.

Alegría shifts the experience of individualized suffering into a surprisingly collective space that questions the processes of psychiatrization and explores the desire to die in its contradictions and negotiations with life.