Muscleworld (2024)

• 78%
• 2024
• Matthew Mifsud

The spectre of American cultural imperialism haunts the aesthetic and performative ethos of contemporary Japanese spaces; the artifice of cultural replication and appropriation bleeds from the flesh of a Japanese economy in decline. Collaged videos of Japanese deathmatch wrestling are plundered from abandoned internet junkyards, their digital identity existing on the margins of accessibility, on the brink of unretrievable nullity. An ouroboric process of digital manipulation, bitrate stretching, perpetual downloading, uploading and redownloading transmute the wrestlers bodies into heraldic effigies to a cultural identity in flux with its celebration and abstraction. The bruised, burnt and scarred flesh is ripped apart through the pastiche of artificial, digital replication; the violence echoing both the threatened and realised violence of American cultural imposition.