DOI 10.60531/INSIGHTOUT.2024.2.13| CORODAN: THE SELF SLIDES OVER THE SELF WITH FRICTION_ INSIGHTOUT 2(2024) 96 is only the mask, the presence in the outside world; the desire of this machine is feminine, and in this con­ceptualisation the feminine takes on destructive am­bitions, sick and feverish. Masculin-Feminin ends with Grigorescu trapping himself in a pyramidal construction of mirrors, forced to confront himself with his other selves in an archi­tecture where one is too few, and two are too many. For a binary gender system in which the masculine ideal was a menial version of the New Soviet man and the feminine ideal flirted between domesticity and women-empowering working-class prerogatives, Grigorescu offered a re-codification – even if only from the cupboard. This re-codification did not aim for the construction of new masculine values or ple­ad for a feminist breakthrough, but rather was con­cerned with a very peculiar deconstructive and de­stabilising hybridisation between the two canonically recognised genders. Through a paradoxical alpha­bet, caught between the real and the constructed in its affirmation of incoherency, with fragmentation and disruption at the core of every letter, Grigorescu stratified the duality of the masculine and the femini­ne as different layers are merged in a superimposed sequence, crossing the boundaries between corpore­al performance and film. So the camera fails, we fail together, in union and division, denying duality while also embracing it. An infrastructure collapsing, I col­lapse with it, in construction.