The Polymorph

Abstract

A creature tattered and alone wanders through urban and desolate spaces on earth and above, in search of respite. The Polymorph is a story of belonging, a story that follows a lonely alien, unidentifiable no face to be seen. What does it mean to belong in today’s world? As Franz Kafka described of the character Odorak in Cares of a Family Man, ‘the whole thing looks senseless enough, but in its own way perfectly finished’ (Kafka, 2002, p.77). I am perplexed by the production of narratives, by the definitions of what it means to be useful, what it means to belong, to be human enough to be considered in today’s world? The story of The Polymorph focuses on an imagined creature that replicates the icons and characters regurgitated in an age-old narrative, repeating itself over and over; as if on a carousel with a formula seemingly forever identical searching for home a place to be ‘me’ with ‘you’. Where has the constructed creature come from? The creature is an amalgamation of broken bits of iconography, imagery, mythology, media and so on, found within societies culture, that suggests to us what our sense of power, belonging and identity should look like. The shape that the creature takes is a poorly constructed spaceman. The creature has been created in the image of human betterment, but come closer, you shall see, it is a fragile, tangible, otherly creature composed of earthly materials. Over layered and stuck together, the creature is trapped and alone in this alien body. This isolated creature, The Symbol, finds anOther along his journey The Sibling. The Symbol wanders through landscapes, isolated in the urban, alienated in the barren. Until it sees a figure; It was tall and stood upright like him, as he came closer, he saw the familiar smooth shape of body. The figure turned around and there, in the stranger’s face, The Symbol saw himself. Knowable, visible, graspable, it was the Other, the Sibling. Integral to this work is the notion of the Other, a concept derived from Edward Said’s the Orient. ‘Its origin in a quotation, or a fragment of text ... or some bit of previous imagining’ (Said, 2003, p.177). The Other is not a human, it is part of a simulacra to control individuals and to dehumanise and disempower an individual or group of people. As well as commenting on this aspect of dominant narratives, the Other within The Polymorph, evolves to explore wider philosophical tropes of existing and ideas of self fractured and mirrored, searching for a space to belong to come home to.