It’s circa November 2012, and a 2,000-pound monolith of clay sits in a blacked-out room at the ONE Archives in Los Angeles, a flashbulb hangs above it. Grunts and deep breaths are heard as images of a body in combat with this monolith are captured in fleeting flashes of light. This is the beginning of Cassils’s perpetual project, Becoming An Image, which has been evolving over the last decade as a continuous archive of trans visibility, violence, and aging. The project lives on as a counter to what seems to be the factory setting of our public discourse: the active erasure of this identity’s collective history. The spectrum of violence that exists around us—which we are losing sensitivity to at alarming rates—ranges from the gruesome broadcast of Israel’s attacks on Palestine and Lebanon to the subtle but intimate conflagration of anti-trans legislation being pushed in the United States. On the more intimate end of this spectrum, trans bodies are policed, displaced, invisibilized, and disempowered. A staged performance might be the last place we think of turning to in order to Becoming An Image seems designed precisely to propel us into embodied action.

Cassils, a transgender artist based in Los Angeles, confronts this brutality. In 2015, they were lit on fire for 14 seconds during a performance titled Inextinguishable Fire, at the National Theatre in London, England. A video of the performance was then presented, with the footage extended to fourteen minutes of slow burning, charging the audience with the dual task of witnessing the horrors of self-immolation and inferring the daily violence we are confronted with from this performance. Whether by being ensconced in fire, or beating the living hell out of a mound of clay, or being encased in an ice sculpture that melt through their own body heat—Tiresias (2011)—Cassils endures pain, discomfort, and exertion not as a necessary means to their work but as a cornerstone of its context and meaning-making. By refusing to turn away from this self-inflicted cruelty, they invite the audiences to follow suit as a co-conspirator. This is especially true of Becoming An Image, wherein the images created by momentary flashes of a synchronized bulb and camera are burned into the retina of the viewer. Absorbing these images, alongside Cassils’s evocative vocal performance, the audience is unavoidably confronted with the question of what it means to be a witness and bystander of violence that is intimate, global, and everything in between.

Cassils’s artistic lineage can be traced back to a long legacy of performance art, beginning with artists in the 1960s seeking to break out of the confines of galleries and their elitist exclusivity. Whereas performance art is often relegated to the esoteric isles of today’s artistic ecosystem, its roots can be found in the richly diverse soil of what Cassils describes as democratic art, as suitable for the white-box gallery as for the nightclubs they used to perform in. This “democratic” outlook also happens to be the most convenient one for an artist whose relentless output defies categorization─from sky typing (In Plain Sight, 2020) to public protest (VB Intervention, 2002). Their artistic output explores the trans experience not only through their own identity, but also through their art’s abilities to transcend conventions of form, material, and presentation. Interestingly, their body has become a living canvas where this variegated artistic experimentation is played out, which is all the more impactful considering the attempts to legislate and restrict trans bodies into a binary.

Cassils’s artistry has transformed, over the last few decades, from a resource to spread awareness about trans liberation targeted at cisgender people, to an inherent practice of trans liberation. One of their most recent works, Human Measure (2022), is a contemporary dance piece with a cast of five trans and nonbinary performers. Confronting the recent rise of transphobic rhetoric and anti-trans legislation in the States, the work gives the stage to trans and non-binary people to articulate their own presence, indulge in intimacy, and embrace the multiplicity and fluidity of their bodies. The expansive world-building of Cassils’s output aims to bring trans and nonbinary people into the process, fostering a culture of solidarity through platforms for imagining the possibility of a different reality. Another component of Human is the creation of live cyanotypes, following an ophthalmologic streak that Cassils has been exploring over the years. Here they play with the duality of darkness and low lighting in opposition to flashes of light, an experiment founded in their ophthalmological study of how images can be “seared” into retinas─which dates back to the inception of Becoming An Image. The result of this experimentation is a process of hijacking the physiology of the audience—their collective body—to experience living photographs and become living archives of an otherwise ephemeral performance. What better way to make the case for trans presence and the presentation of their histories than to burn images of trans people into the eyes of cis beholders?

The foundations of this argument were laid by Cassils with Becoming An Image, and continues to interrogate the hurdles of trans visibility in a quest to illuminate a collective truth. This argument feels relevant now more than ever, as we witness Israel’s destruction of the libraries, universities, and archival consciousness of the Palestinian people. When material archives are decimated by 2,000-pound bombs, the idea of Palestine can be kept alive through its people─and in the moral retina of its supporters around the world. 

It’s a privilege to get to construct your own image, to choose the memories that linger in the minds of those who perceive you. Cassils recognizes their privileged positionality as a white transmasculine person and understands the danger of drawing a parallel between the violence they perform on a soundstage and the violence of genocide on the global stage. They note that the stakes—and bodies involved—are very different. From Turtle Island to Palestine, trans and Indigenous histories are being made invisible to create a palatable “archive” of the dominant narrative. 

Becoming An Image is evocative precisely because it is an archive—particularly of trans violence. The block of clay begins as a clean-cut monolith and is transformed at the end to a sculpture of performed violence, embedded with every knuckle-mark and imprint of the artist’s body. Throughout the performance, the pitch blackness of the setting forces Cassils to use the encircling audience as a guiding map, bringing them back to the clay monolith when they get lost in the darkness. The stage, therefore, is always set for communal action, where the archive cannot be created by Cassils alone. In the audience of such a performance, the darkness forces us together to rely on each other for pathfinding. Though embodied in the performer’s person, Becoming An Image allows us to practice this communal resilience in real time, and reminds us that an alternative future is possible.