NUN CONFESSIONALS :

mirror , mirror on the wall


NUN CONFESSIONALS is an “intraactive” (ref. Karan Barad ) installation and performance that explores how the digital mind-box is both a prison and a portal, touching upon themes of fragmentation vs. wholeness. The digital landscape is explored as both a confessional and spirit space, and social media as both haven and hell.

The questions I pose through this work are: can the digital sphere act as a portal towards integration of lost parts of self? Or does it lead to further fragmentation, becoming a graveyard full of hungry ghosts? Can this new landscape being born act as a mirror and sanctuary to safely explore the formally repressed parts of identity? Is the absence of physical touch or logistical life-based facts a hindrance in connection, or does it expand our capacity to love ourselves and the “stranger” beyond the binary identities and labels tagged and imprinted upon us since birth (e.g. gender, societal conditioning, cultural framework, sexual orientation, age, class, etc)? Can digital glitches act as a queered hole that leads toward wholeness & holiness, or does it instead cause further fissures and separation of selfhood from Soul? Is this intangible veil between physical/spirit/mind— a boundary that blocks, hides, and eventually shames, or is it a bridge that opens, exposes, and begins to accept the complexity and nuances that are innately part of human conditionality? Is inter-web anonymity a form of freedom or another kind of mask?


WHY NUNS? 🪬

A nun is both hidden and holy. The nun embodies a life of renunciation, duty, and devotion towards something unseen/invisible/or hidden — an ethereal spirit (eg. Jesus Christ)— that exists beyond one’s immediate physical environment or stage, and born-into-identity. This is a version of queered love; where a love that is misaligned with societal norms is redirected toward an unseen or ineffable presence. The nun’s life of symbolic celibacy, silence, and sacrifice becomes a parable for queer longing: a desire often coded, exiled, or redirected from public expression into interiority, imagination, or the divine.

At the same time, the nun can represent repression and societal control. Personal desire is sublimated into sacred practice. Traditional practices can lose their spiritual undertones and become dogmatic when a perceived or judged sacrilegious pathway toward spiritual union or enlightenment is found outside the institution’s normal regulations. Therefore, the nun often finds freedom through coded glitches that can then safely express their suppressed queered voice of soul, but through naked veiled truths.


THIS BECOMES THE PERFECT PARABLE FOR THE DIGITAL WORLD. IT LEAVES US WITHOUT PHYSICAL GRATIFICATION OF PERSONAL TOUCH-BASED LOVE-ORIENTED FULFILMENT, AND IS BOTH A PRISON AND PORTAL TO EXPLORE OUR DEEPER SELVES ISOLATED FROM PHYSICAL UNION OR TOUCH.


WHY THE VEIL? 🫥

In this exploration, the veil is an intangible, non-physical partition that both separates and protects, hides and reveals, dismisses and gives revelation to a sacred truth typically buried within the subconscious mind and collective body. What happens when a truth that was previously concealed finds avenues for expression through the veil? Or when the expresser (eg. nun) wishes to be witnessed and accepted within their [re]new[ed]/found truth off the digital stage? What happens when that which is hidden, made invisible, or is unheard, denied, or branded with a scarlet letter, finds solace inside the abstract, metaphorical, and coded avatars of digital space? Does this lead to eventual integration or to further separation and spiritual bypassing?


QUEERED ITCH IS THE DIGITAL GLITCH

Digital culture is often the only safe space for expression of a fully embodied self outside heteronormative or binary social scripts. Queered love, identity, and memory decorate the internet through subtext, code, and mythic avatars when IRL bans our naturally queered desires and judges or denies them as wrong, illogical, impractical, impossible, or crazy. Digital space often becomes the only safe space to express these natural inclinations through refraction and code. It is a new performance stage.

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At the heart of this piece, a pulsing theme and question arises:

The internet can offer a safe space for a queered perspective to find voice through subtext and code. It becomes both a playground and board-game for excavating the shadow or veiled self; myth and metaphor becoming potent tools in exploring the subconscious and collective unconscious realms through imagination — while also potentially becoming a vortex or black mirror to lose oneself within the illusion of fantasy.

Which path will we choose?

  • Will we integrate into bodily wholeness, cutting and pasting the freedom and beauty of soul’s song we found beneath the veil of the inter-web?

  • Or will we deny, gaslight, and spiritually bypass through compartmentalisation, and further psychic disintegration when the nun stands nude?

  • Can we leave behind outdated binary judgements and begin to see that the nuances of human complexity are often outside this realm & are still valid, true, and worthy of acceptance?

  • Can we truly love without conditions?


  • Or will we stay veiled inside the convent — placating our wild roots through coded avatars on a digital stage — or risk our reputation & return to the coven to dance with shameless abandon underneath the naked stars?

  • And can we embody & integrate these teachings found within the digital wormhole into our physical lives and communities?


    …. because if we do, then the digital world becomes a beautiful fragmented mirror to weave ourselves & the world whole again …

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I do not have the answer to a future path that’s true — but maybe the Oracle Nun does & will share it with us too.

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Join me this September in NYC —

details coming soon

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On set — Folkestone, UK — 2025