unbecomings
Catalogue Launch & Reading with Sārāh Mārtinus

TransMutation Strategy
Who will bend when the mutable won't?

with a response by Misal Adnan Yıldız, curator of unbecomings

Tuesday, 11 November, 7 p.m.
Zilberman Berlin

​​​​​​​Eroding allowances of ambiguity in psyche, the hypervigilant searches for safety, yet in relation there is none. Safety does not exist, did it ever?

Through a great denial, unbecoming, is ‘to claim’, a returning to lost memory. Non-interventional reparations of control and possessions, re-claimed through beauty, are about recognition of the invisible, a remembering. 
Unnaming is a teaching of entanglements.
Sit with this. Do not solve it.

Contributing as an open, independent space holder - 
Perhaps a beckoning or a hybrid-allowance of things to further break-open.
As a haunting and mutation, a creeping adaptation of echo, the mutable winds through the in-betweens.
The offer: poetic, depth-orientated.
To unbecome, recognises a loss, yet always remains in relation to the essential.

Through dismemberments, we dive into the intra-psychic edges of solidarity, survival. We lean into the growth edges of kinship & contradictions, fraying our edges further into re-membering processes, our curious carrying; through call & response, amplifications and word associations, our connections, our meet ups along the way(s), pre-constellated, or called into being.

We orbit words as poly-seeds* (urging transformative template of 'polycrisis')
Expanding in reflections, from Misal’s words as sparks;
failure, (and the logic of)
two-spirit search for freedom
being marked by damage (*also as worn grooves in beloved objects*)
disrupting, escape
topographies of collectivities
sheltering, roots
dictation of perception (also: manipulations of attention)
friendly, planetary equitable (new emancipatory templates, calling in)

The context of this poem is a ‘Dismantling Spell’, displaying a process of sought ancestral forgiveness and liberation, including our reader in the same ‘open and grotesque body’ as the perspective from which the poem was written. This dismantling spell is a ‘leading by example’, of how one might grapple with contradictory lineages and narratives, expanding outside the limits of an individual mind; expanding outside limits of personal reciprocity, in the here and now.

This wide lens aims to allow grace in places of potent contradictions, speaking a release to some of the shared experiences of queer, diasporic, brown and mutable bodies, who might encounter consistently narrow images within ethno/euro-centric, and colonial contexts: utterances of ‘the she who did not get to be’.

Relationally informed through the being and non being of Glissant’s Poetics Of Relation, and contextualised within Achille Mbembe’s Politics of Viscerality, the lyrics of this poem, its twisted fleshiness, tap into transformative words as power.

A ‘Quantum Lyric’ has references to the thoughts of Rasheedah Phillips, and was accessed through work and sharing of poet John Gavin White. What begins as an erosion, refusal, signalling a dismantle, drips into depth of the essential.

Both the ancient and the prophecy – ecstatic practice – we read as if in trance – speaking to our present moment. As Ann Waldmann writes: ‘rubble speaks of unborn possibilities of truth and beauty’.

This work has been created especially to accompany the community body of unbecomings, the artists’ and curator’s practices whose work forms the show, the gallery team who carry it through the world & the audience with their role of receiving.

The images of disappearing leaves, compost, as accompaniment offer a symbolic, elemental example of unbecoming, a dismantling, a composting, an abundance of decay, a transformation, a death. Through recognising our communal bodies within these cycles in nature, we may find release, detachment and surrender to the unfathomable.

Thank you all very much for this freeing space to let some of these voices out, especially to Misal Adnan Yildiz and his expansive planetary visioning.
Writing this has been very transformative.

​​​​​​​Text: Sārāh Mārtinus

​​​​​​​On Dismantling... Image by Sarah Martinus, 2025.