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Ben Savizon

Ben Savizon

London, United Kingdom
UNIVERSITY/COLLEGE Royal College of Art
Course RITUAL TECHNOLOGY SERIES
SPECIALISMS Non-gendered

Contact Tutor
flora.mclean@rca.ac.uk

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Ritual Technology is a sculptural-performance piece made from a rusted steel frame, spiked embellishments and a latex body. It is a reinterpretation of the biblical hairshirt, a garment worn beneath robes for self-flagellation. Here, it is brought to the surface as spectacle, blurring the line between the erotic and the spiritual. This work emerges from my upbringing in a Christian-Caribbean (SDA) church, confronting the shame imposed by belief systems that framed my identity as deviant. Reimagining theology through a Queer lens is not blasphemy. It is survival. The piece challenges binary ideas of purity, devotion and faith by embodying what has long been cast as indecent. Myth, ritual and theology are living cultural materials. I disrupt and reassemble them to reflect the present. For those of us never safe in religious histories, there is a need to invent new ritual technologies that speak to who we are now. In this piece, ritual becomes a method of transmuting inherited pain into form. In a post-secular world, faith is both distant and ingrained. As neoliberal structures collapse, what fills the void is often nostalgia disguised as moral clarity. This revival of conservative Christianity is not neutral. It serves as a mask for control and exclusion. My contention is not with faith itself, but with the systems built around it. We will not return. We will not conform. We will take their language and symbols and reimagine them for the communities they erased and neglected. That reclamation, that redistribution of power through embodied belief, is at the core of my practice.

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