I am not myself is an incantation to resist the prevailing vanities of our times. Participants repeat, ‘I am not myself,’ to each other, while passing round mirrors back and forth. The hope is that in repetition, the phrase enters our unconscious and we allow ourselves to not be ourselves. It is permissive — without ourselves how will we refocus? 

When I was a child someone told me that the reflections we see in mirrors are made with our own eyes; that they are transpositions of our peripheral visions (We have eyes on the back of our heads! We have memories of what we have seen around us!) rather than reflections of the external world. While this isn’t true, it took me too long to disprove; maybe because there is a deep fantasy embedded in this: what if my vision was so vast that I was fabricating my own reflections? A mirror phase gone askew. If I am not my reflection, then what else am I not bound to? I want to transpose new reflections. I am not myself is a meditation on this exactly — an active distending, a dismantling of the self in its fabrications, to create a vacuousness, a capaciousness, a space for something new. Can I be less alone with my thoughts? If I let myself go, what will I open myself up to?

→ Adorno’s Nonidentity is the excess of reality that our concepts fail to grasp. I want to experience this slip as something collective. 

→ In A Voice and Nothing More, Mladen Dolar discusses Echo and Narcissus. The world we live in privileges Narcissus, but what if we privileged Echo instead? What if we listened to each other rather than gaze endlessly at ourselves? I want to identify with the sounds we emit.