AUN HELDEN

My natural habitat is the middle ground between human failure and the splendor of nature’s metamorphosis.

Vanessa Ruiz: You describe yourself as a dream. “I’m a nightmare dressed like a daydream” once said the queen of breakup songs Taylor Swift, sort of a similar vibe to yours, just a little bit different… Tell us the latest dream you had. Did you have blonde bangs too?

Aun Helden: I usually have more abstract dreams in a very David Lynch way. The last dream I had, I was in a large lake with hot springs surrounded by Japanese snow monkeys, they were very calm taking a bath and I was there too, almost meditative. I remember that I slept yesterday thinking about the movie ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’, especially the scenes with the monkeys, but I’m glad my brain only picked up the reference to the monkey and not the violence.

VR: The connection with nature is important to you. It’s like looking at a spore, a plant organism characterized by high resistance to environmental conditions even the most adverse ones. What is your natural habitat? Would you prefer to be seen by the naked eye, through a microscope or just naked?

AH: My relationship with nature is also more of a desire to decentralize the human and the system that governs its structure. I think we need to really look at nature as a real form of life, not a synthetic ornament of beauty. The human being would accept transfiguration as a gift of existence, rather than rejecting it. My natural habitat is the middle ground between human failure and the splendor of nature’s metamorphosis. I like people to see me as a fantasy in the middle of it all, an incisive intersection between reality and the unreal and friction, the angry root of a tree emerging from concrete.

VR: In your film “Eternidade”, an ethereal figure passes through the decomposition of the body reaching the belief that metamorphosis is not salvation. We are taught that change is always positive, what do you think about it? Is it just a phrase for fortune cookies? How can immutability be applied to human experience?

AH: “Eternidade”  is a film that is an allegory to the process of “gender transition”. As a trans person, I believe that in many moments I placed the salvation of my existence in this process, but I understood that even though I am in this place and experiencing the body in another way, even radical, I am still human. And humans are a product in a failure process, and accepting this failure makes us more apt to transfigure ourselves based on error, instead of looking for a healing process. We also understand the flaws and scars as producers of identity. We cannot cling to any process as salvation, because salvation is the result of a religious idea that is structured on the basis of a truth. And what I most desire at this moment is not exactly to be a lie in this great game of life, but to be a pile of other experimental truths.