CURA.

The monster Velvet worm arrived in a suitcase. It has to be able to do many things; concertinaing its segmented body into the confines of a hand-luggage cocoon, pupating in the darkness until such time as the audience arrives at the gallery, expanding in size and endowment to consume the bodies of two human performers who, from this moment on, will provide it with sensory stimuli, energy and propulsion. These are just some of the transitions the monster embraces in order to thrive.

These words carry the hope and intention of introducing some of the revolving cast of monsters that populate Monster Chetwynd’s work. The fact that Monster adopted the name ‘Monster’ in April 2018 poses some challenges in differentiating who is the subject and what is the object of this writing; objectification being a cultural phenomenon that monsters are more than familiar with. The making of a monster is often in the eye of the beholder since we humans have a strong capacity for projecting our fears and our shame outwards, concretizing it within an animal, vegetable or mineral form. Monster, however, has adopted the name as a self-determined act of titling that identifies per as one of a diverse tribe of shape-shifters that celebrate contamination, complexity and conglomeration where others would run away from it. This re-titling was followed by a change of pronouns from she/her to ze/per earlier this year. Another boundary dissolved, another container of categorization burst open.

Monster tells me that nature documentaries featuring the Velvet worm show that, despite looking like a ridiculously cute and lovable Pokémon, it is in fact a formidable and vicious predator. This unexpected contradiction is a big part of the worm’s attraction. It emerges at night and creeps about on its stumpy little legs, gently stroking the things it encounters in the darkness to assess their suitability for consumption. According to Monster, the hunt revolves around a split-second climax in which “funny pudgy things that look like eyes suddenly shoot forward and squirt glue all over its prey.” The worm then devours its victim at a leisurely pace, along with the protein-based slime that envelopes it for reasons of efficiency that add to the worm’s aura of vulgar satisfaction.

The creatures that appear in Monster’s performances are often scaled up from nature and assimilated into human-centric environments. They are handmade with degradable materials; paper, paint and cardboard stuck fast with latex. Everywhere they go they leave a pungent whiff of latex behind, and when they are packed they have to be dusted with talc to avoid everything sticking fast to everything else. Cutting, pasting, re-purposing and recycling are construction methods long associated with the medium of collage. Rooted in the French verb coller meaning ‘to stick,’ collage is a process of cutting, assembling and reconfiguring as a way of generating alternative meanings that often disrupt entrenched art-historical hierarchies. High or low, artist or amateur; the medium’s eclectic potential overcomes attempts at categorization in the same way that monsters do.

Monster’s sticky construction process is not limited to the physical materials used to construct puppets, costumes and scenery, but includes the collaging together of subject matter. Inspiration, for example, comes from a book by Octavia E. Butler called Adulthood Rites, in which worm-like aliens take over the planet and force humans to have sex with them.

Many of the creatures that populate Monster’s work have penetrating stares. The Owl with the Laser Eyes of 2018, for example, or the colonies of bats that have reappeared alongside performances many times over the years, peering out with their strange bulbous faces and glinting cheeky eyes. In literature and in art there are many opportunities to gaze directly at the grotesque. Each encounter with a monster is both an opportunity and a risk. Since monsters are often misunderstood due to their ugly appearances, they are bestowed a unique point of view that shows up human empathy as being in shorter supply than we’d like to think ourselves capable of. Monster describes Charles Laughton’s emotionally absorbing performance as the Hunchback of Notre Dame as speaking to this dynamic. Monster’s work sets out to rehabilitate monsters, acknowledging that looking through the monster’s eyes is very enabling and offers great transformative potential.

Monster’s Velvet worm hatched out of the suitcase at Massimo De Carlo gallery in Paris in time for a performance titled Hungry Eyes that coincided with Halloween in 2023. Inside the worm costume, it’s impossible to see and so cumbersome that it requires two people to wear it with another two handling the tail from the outside. “There were a lot of chaotic elements that made it fun,” says Monster, including exploding miniature fireworks and a smoke machine. For this partially-sighted worm, hunting depends on the help of people around it who shout whether it’s nearing a victim or not. A gaggle of onlookers stands on the street with their noses pressed to the windowpane, which by this time is steamy, sweaty and covered with sticky strings. The gallery is transformed into a carnivalesque terrarium. Later the worm breaks free of the gallery and lumbers down upon the sequined bodysuit-clad performers who writhe on the pavement, either in ecstasy or in terror, it’s not clear.

A question that is often asked in relation to monsters is whether there is a risk of our creations destroying us. The dominant cultural touchstone for this is Frankenstein who is hunted down by the monster he has created. A contemporary re-iteration of this theme is the debate around AI and the fear of the unknown paths this intelligence may lead us down, possibly including a re-evaluation of how to classify and value human life. Monster vehemently opposes this mechanistic narrative trajectory, saying:

I think that’s a male line of creativity. And I entirely think that solutions are within the creativity [otherwise] where the hell are the solutions going to come from? We’re not making some fuck up. We’re not making a collaged together dead person come to life. We’re making a new territory that enables and allows people to grow and develop.

Monsters such as Velvet worm make space for new ways of being, so that we don’t have to be trapped in the social conditioned roles we’re prescribed. We’re allowed to think differently and to transform, creating new possibilities. Paul B. Preciado reiterates this power of not quite becoming in his provocative text Can the Monster Speak?:

The monster is one who lives in transition. One whose face, body and behaviours cannot yet be considered true in a predetermined regime of knowledge and power.
The transitional nature of the monster’s being means that it’s difficult for regimes of knowledge and power to keep up or to absorb and therefore exploit the monster’s creative capacity.

Monster’s film titled Face Cream (2018) draws inspiration from The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov set in 1930’s Moscow. Margarita applies a magic cream all over her body that transforms her from a woman of unremarkable status into a powerful witch. Throughout the novel the social structures that bind the Muscovites are uprooted and perverted through the use of magic. Reality dissolves into fantasy, all while the people are distracted by, among other things, a rain of banknotes and a surplus of fine silk stockings. The film Face Cream shows a group of people mixing up creams while walking talking mandrake roots roam an apothecary garden.
Whether monsters are expelled or rehabilitated depends on our ability to look at the parts of ourselves we like the least and aspects of the world that we fear the most. The narratives that Monster weaves together invite the possibility that social structures can be reformed, roles can be upended and magic is made out of reality. This takes place within the frame of a structured performance space that Monster has a reasonable degree of control over. The most terrifying monsters however are those that have yet to take shape but whose materializing presence feels inevitable; human hubris in relation to the environment or inequality with all its many faces, for example. In the current political climate, art—or more specifically, fictional narrative—is often assumed to hold very little power in comparison to the scale of the world’s problems.

At the 16th Istanbul Biennial, The Seventh Continent, in 2019 Monster presented The Gorgon’s Playground: four hybrid human-animal creatures made from biodegradable materials. A spider-human, snake-human, a relative of the sphynx and a bat-human which were scaled up from toys. These creatures stood as sentinels against a curatorial backdrop that focused visitors’ minds on the floating island of plastic that drifts in the Pacific Ocean. In the words of Nicolas Bourriaud, “the seventh continent is the country we don’t want to inhabit, made up of everything we reject.” In the face of this intractable problem, Monster’s figures are avatars invoking the power of the bat, the lion, the snake and the spider. They are handmade, wobbly looking and saturated with the bright primary colors of a child’s paint palette. They look like they’re only resting here to catch a breath before scuttling back into a crevice or darting up into the air. Their little expressive faces are looking back at us saying, “I see you, I see all your possible selves: which one will you choose to be?”

To date, it hasn’t been possible to solve our most nightmarish problems using cognitive narratives of cause and effect. This well-trodden path too often leads to paralysis through denial, cynicism and depression. Children have a powerful capacity for spontaneous play and this is one of the fundamental ways we develop the ability to navigate fear and risk. As adults, finding ways to break free of the cognitive brain’s truncated understanding of selfhood is more difficult. Monster’s performances are spaces that invite an upwelling of counterculture. The performers bring their own self-expression and energetic potential to the space. In addition to being a diva, Monster is the glue that holds the performance together, collaging together personalities, friendships, political identities and lived experiences to make an entity that takes form in the moment and doesn’t always know where it will end up. A playful dance weaves between control and chaos, which Monster describes as making new territory that allows people to grow and develop.

A memorable quote I’ve absorbed of Monster’s comes to mind even though I can no longer place the source: “Everything I make looks like it’s about to fall down, which is a good look in many ways.” The handmade style developed by piecing together layers of paper, cardboard and other freely circulating materials is part of what makes Monster’s monsters so approachable. It’s also a firm stylistic choice that demarcates the monster’s realm as that of counterculture. Monster talks about the importance of making the hybrid bat-human by hand. This approach is aligned with other political movements that seek to renounce slick production aesthetics in favor of a more democratic and relatable look. Monster references Hito Steyerl’s 2009 essay In Defense of the Poor Image and the Third Cinema movement of 1960’s Latin America, which embraced the use of grainy amateurish film and rejected high-end Hollywood aesthetics. Monster’s mode of creation is akin to bricolage: limited material means are recycled, repurposed and adapted in ways that make use of limitation as an agent of possibility.

Not wishing to be mistaken with the politics and the aesthetics of the systems that have created the yet faceless monsters of our time is a powerful statement of intent. The search for territory offering fertile ground for new possibilities is most productive when carried out in the zones that leave space because other people avoid them. The underground is at work, and is often labelled monstrous. The question of the monster’s role in contemporary culture really depends on how you choose to approach fear itself. For Monster, not being afraid of the bogeymen people try to scare each other with is part of a process of sidestepping denial, cynicism and depression in order to move through the world with maximum impact. Monster is loving monsters, running towards monsters, cuddling monsters and unleashing their empowering and non-conformist potential.