DOI 10.60531/INSIGHTOUT.2024.2.13| CORODAN: THE SELF SLIDES OVER THE SELF WITH FRICTION_ INSIGHTOUT 2(2024) 96is 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-Femininends with Grigorescu trappinghimself in a pyramidal construction of mirrors, forcedto 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 masculineideal was a menial version of the New Soviet manand the feminine ideal flirted between domesticityand women-empowering working-class prerogatives,Grigorescu offered a re-codification – even if onlyfrom the cupboard. This re-codification did not aimfor 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 canonicallyrecognised genders. Through a paradoxical alphabet, caught between the real and the constructedin its affirmation of incoherency, with fragmentationand disruption at the core of every letter, Grigorescustratified the duality of the masculine and the feminine as different layers are merged in a superimposedsequence, crossing the boundaries between corporeal performance and film. So the camera fails, we failtogether, in union and division, denying duality whilealso embracing it. An infrastructure collapsing, I collapse with it, in construction.
