Mathilda Oosthuizen

This project has morphed from a short story based on Kafka’s Metamorphosis, into moving image and audio. Offering movement and transformations of text from the page and mutations of multiple voices all cajoling to be something else.

The audio gives space for the listener to conjure up images from the tangles of voices. Telling stories emanating from a human transforming into a cockroach, Marina Warner’s research into Metamorphosis and a biological account of the anatomy of a cockroach - pulled together by Katrina Palmer’s End Matter, taking the listener to Portland where a very slow transformation took place a long long time ago.    

To be Somewhere Else written was as an alternative to Kafka’s Metamorphosis. Drawing from a desire to be elsewhere, the short story became the foundation for the moving image work, To be Something Else. The process of writing provided a structure from which breakages were forged – splitting apart the text, its form, content and meaning. Forming the beginnings of the central themes of recognising the agency of nonhumans and the pulling closer together of text and nonhuman forms to expand on the material meaning of text.