Cassandra Troyan

Cassandra Troyan is an artist, writer, researcher, and organizer whose work demarcates space for interventions in the spheres of theory, politics, and culture. They are the author of three books: THRONE OF BLOOD (Solar Luxuriance 2013), BLACKEN ME BLACKEN ME, GROWLED (Tiny Hardcore Press 2014/Civil Coping Mechanisms 2016), KILL MANUAL (Artifice Books 2014) and two chapbooks, HATRED OF WOMEN (Solar Luxuriance 2014) and A THEORY IN TEARS (ANNOTATIONS & CASES FOR FREEDOM & PROSTITUTION) (Kenning Editions 2016). Their writing or interviews have appeared in The New Inquiry, Social Text Online, Chicago Review, Entropy Mag, Shifter Magazine, Elderly, ARMED CELL, Full Stop, Tripwire, Splinter Mag, Blind Field: A Journal of Cultural Inquiry, and Harriet: The Blog at Poetry Foundation. From 2010-2015 they curated the reading and performance series ARTIFICIAL EAR with numerous friends and collaborators in Chicago, IL where they also received their MFA in Visual Arts from the University of Chicago.

They have presented, performed, or screened their work at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASSMoCA); the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago (MCA); The University of Toronto’s “Sex Salon” at the Mark Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies; Poetics: (The Next) 25 Years at SUNY-University at Buffalo NY; Capitalism, Crisis and Ideology lecture series at Cardiff University in Cardiff, Wales; Casco: Office for Art, Design & Theory in Utrecht, NL; Stanford Humanities Center at Stanford University; Perdu Literary Foundation in Amsterdam, NL; The Poetry Project, NY; Chicago Poets’ Theater Festival, Sussex Poetry Festival in Brighton, UK; Royal Holloway in London, UK; with retrospectives at Spectacle Theater in Brooklyn, NY and at Artists’ Television Access in San Francisco, CA. In fall of 2016 they were a Writer in Residence at Headlands Center for the Arts.

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Undervisning

They teach theory, creative/critical writing practices, and collaborative/performative interventions as a Senior Lecturer and Programme Coordinator for Visual Communication + Change.

Forskning

Their research demarcates spaces for collective experience through the exploration of myths, normative (gender) roles, radical histories of resistance, and cultural influence as a means to re-organizing agency in the disorganization of daily life. Cutting across the spheres of theory, politics, and culture, their practice is informed by and involved with, the aesthetics of resistance, autonomous organizing around issues of community self-defense, mutual aid, and sex worker rights.

Troyan’s writing explores the terror of becoming female amidst the accelerated haze of contemporary culture, deriving pleasure and power from interrogations of submission, violence, queer desire, sex work, horror, and capital. By engaging a practice of radical alterity, Christopher Higgs writes in a review at The Collagist, “The question Throne of Blood seems interested in provoking is not the basic ontological question, 'what does it mean to be,' but rather a more rabidly black and potently nihilistic question: who gives a fuck about being? Or, put in the form of a statement rather than a question: to be is not to be, forget the question.” At Vice, Blake Butler evinces another notion of being in Kill Manual, as “Troyan infects the struggle of the self into a living, breathing language-system, spitting and shrieking and cackling rather than just whining and worshipping, using reality's death threat against itself.”