Esprit-de-corps / Corpse explosion: The cadaver that gives rise to something else
Uma Breakdown is an artist and award-winning game designer interested in animals, horror, queer feminist literature, and ecology. "Everything I make is about some combination of love, grief, hallucination, and an excess of joy."
Breakdown describes this talk as "a split lecture, guided by Hélène Cixous and the writer’s various proposals for art production to be seen through death and dying."
"The first part tracks around my long-term research interests and practise, exploring what I short-hand as “The Reparative Gothic”, horror that re-prioritises love, affect, and solidarity.
The second part moves onto my current and in-progress work around decomposition and cybernetics.
Things to potentially expect include: Warhammer 40,000, Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal, Haruspicy, the video game Dead Space, pharmaceutically induced impairment, the work of Hideaki Anno, “Michelle Forbes Studies”, and whale falls."
Uma Breakdown completed a PhD in 2020 about The Evil Dead, care, écriture feminine, and disaster. With Sammy Paloma they make video games about the divine and occult providence of transfemme existence. Uma is currently an “Unseen Futures” Fellow with A.N.D, and have just opened their first solo exhibition “Earth A.D.” co-commissioned by and touring across Wysing Arts Centre (Cambridge, 2022), FACT (Liverpool, 2023), and Quad (Derby, 2024).