Kostas Stasinopoulos: Let’s start by the title of the film, which made me think of Sara Ahmed’s work on the importance of thinking through the skin. In her book Thinking through the Skin she calls for a “skin-tight politics, a politics that takes as its orientation not the body as such, but the fleshy interface between bodies and worlds”. At certain points, while we watch the film, the image or screen is shrinking, folding, wrinkling like skin, which is very compelling. What is the role of skin in Skin Flick?  

Adham Faramawy: The phrase Skin Flick was offered with lightness of touch and with humour. I meant it as a double entendre, the skin flick as pornographic movie, the flick of the skin as a sensual gesture and sensation, and the reference to skin as you so deftly put it in quoting Sara Ahmed, as a site of the political, a border and a boundary, a point of interface, and I’ll answer with a quote by Donna Haraway taken from the same book edited by Ahmed and Jackie Stacey: “Why should our bodies end at the skin, or include at best other beings encapsulated by skin?” An image of skin as porous.

KS: This film features a beautifully written, narrated and hardcoded narrative throughout all its frames. What is the role of language in your work?

AF: For me language has been a way to map out the space between experience and mediation, between the thing and it’s description. As with any element of my work, language is a site of slippage and instability.

KS: As ever in your practice, we see an emphasis on liquidity, a passion for slime, a desire for entanglement via the exchange and sharing of fluids. What is so fascinating for you about these materials and states of being and experience?

AF: In describing my work, curator Vincent Honoré talked about the quality of liquidity in terms of displacement and contamination, the invocation of liquidity as a denial of categories and taxonomies, a resistance. More recently I’ve been drawing on the thinking of Astrida Neimanis, in their text “Becoming Water”, in further considering ideas of a queer porous body, of the water and slime that we are and that run through us.

KS: I wonder what is your relationship to what you refer to as the “monstrous” in this film? I always thought that your work deals with abjection in a way that is fearless yet very sensitive at the same time, something that I really appreciate in artistic practice that is active in queer discourse.

AF: The monstrous is a social construct and a way for me to accept and be accountable for the parts of myself and my desire which are socially unpalatable. It’s there in my use of plant taxonomy, in looking at weeds and invasive species, after poet Marwa Helal; in looking at the most vulgar, often inter-species, biological expressions of desire as a way to make space for my own.

KS: Considering that skin is home to millions of bacteria and microorganisms, a site of multiplicity, coexistence and interconnectedness that is very similar to that of soil, Skin Flick becomes a place where all these worlds collide. There is a powerful moment in the film where we hear you say “I want to be buried in a mushroom death suit. I want them to eat me, metabolize me, and the toxins in my body”. It seems that death becomes the ultimate site of connection between the bodies in the film and what we deem as the “natural” world. How do you think about bodies and the environment together in your practice?

AF: A one-time friend, Octopus, introduced me to their fermentation practice, telling me about the microbiome and describing the body as a holobiont, a diverse ecology comprising thousands of different cells and microbes in a state of co-evolution entangled with our environment. This image of the body moving through space as a multispecies ecology, a soup, got me thinking about my relationship with and my responsibilities to the land, particularly after I pass away.

As an Egyptian and a Muslim, I’ve often thought about the particularities of burial rites. I appreciate and value the immediacy of going back to the earth after death. I’ve often considered the houses and cities of the dead in Egypt but I’ve always wanted to be buried under, to become an apple tree after I pass away. How can this be possible if, as artist Jae Rhim Lee suggests, I’ve absorbed hundreds of toxins that will leak out of my skin after burial, making the ground barren for several generations? And this is why I imagine through their artwork the mushroom death suit, a way for fungi to ingest the toxins my body contains, allowing me to return to the earth and become something else.

KS: There is palpable desire and eroticism in all its forms throughout the film. You also talk about the sex life of plants “as a complex affair” and plants as capable of expressing “polymorphous perversity, unimaginable to human beings”. Interestingly, in his early psychoanalytic writings, Sigmund Freud refers to the infant’s sexuality as “polymorphously perverse” too, something that he suggests subsides later with age and the effect of culture on psychic life. What kind of worlds is Skin Flick bringing together and what states of being and feeling are perceived as different between them?

AF: I enjoy that image of the primacy of a childlike sensuality, it foregrounds the importance of play for me.I’ve been reading and listening to the words of theorist Catriona Sandilands, particularly her talk “Botanically Queer” and again Astrida Neimanis’ text “Composting Feminisms”. In a similar way to Helal, Sandilands describes the ways in which plant taxonomies, and the ways we name and attempt to categorize nature, have often found methods for destabilising colonial order and undermining sexual definition. Thinking through plant sexuality queers and makes unfamiliar definitions of human social and sexual interaction, which I couldn’t help but delight in.

KS: CGI plants, skin products, mycelium networks, anti-aging drugs, fresh flowers in honey and Cindy Crawford drinking Pepsi... I always love the elements that you bring together in your work, in an opulent mix for the mind and the senses, punctuated at times by pop culture references. There is so much fun yet all the while the politics of your work never escape the viewer and I find this invigorating. Do you like to have fun with your work and what is the role of pleasure in your practice

AF: Centring pleasure is a survival strategy for me, a way of making space and building connection and community. I’ve often drawn on a highly problematic notion inferred from the writing of Steven Shaviro, an image of late capitalism having no edges and that the only way out is through; to solve the riddle of life after capital, it seems we must chew through it as material, like the mealworm eating polystyrene and shitting compost. Cognizing through capitalism as a sensual practice, breaking it down into mulch, leaving something fertile for the generations that come after.