Anaïs Serres

The Vampyroteuthis Infernalis is a squid from the abyss, living in impermanent hierarchies, ephemeral existences, and ever changing language. 

This is the tale of how it came to the surface and melted from its pressure. The depthless’ imposed rationality, truth, and orders are incompatible with the Squid and has led it to a slimy death. The love of three hearts is inadequate. It thrives in the abyss, where it wears the world on its skin, devours what it encounters, and gets devoured as well. It prospers in constant change and movement, and the surface’s urge to define and order has brought it to its fall. What’s left is its retracted tentacles, holding a nest of its fiction and poetics, standing next to its melting corpse, and the imposed definitions of its being. 

Siana is a vampire squid from hell that has descended from the abyss, after their world started to fracture from the surface’s pressure. They invite us to hear their story and join in the remnants of their dances and cries. 

A pool of darkness opened interrupting our dances, a pitch-black scream, perhaps silent. 

I was the universe. The Feverish beings. 

Then time came. 

I entered the black pool, leaving the shimmering colours and lights of our whirls, the timeless constellations of universes, and our cannibalistic love. 

My land is not to be described. It is meant to be ungraspable, like the murmur of the wind, the froth of the sea, the impenetrable sucking sight of the night skies. 

My language was my nerves, and theirs. I still hold them inside

I descended from the abyss and I entered the black pool.

We had no names, no language, no time. 

My waters were dense, pleasurable, slimy, loveable, orgasmic, fatal, creator and destroyer, boiling with passion and absurdities. 

This other water I swam into is tepid. Its current singular. 

I laid my eyes on a human for the first time. I had to let go of my diversities - it did not like the chaos. 

The breach opened up to the Kingdom. That's what the human called it. It called it the Kingdom. The kingdom of idolatrously worshipped notions.

The Sons of the Kingdom were too scared to disintegrate under the pressure of a reality greater than their minds, and my body lost its lights under the pressure of the imposed rationality and proclaimed truth of said Kingdom. 

I wanted to eat it all and let it devour me, but its ways are one-sided. The love of three hearts is inadequate. 

The Kingdom sucked me in its ways, traumatising my body and multiplicities, and I crumbled. It is as a pathetic ghost beyond decomposition i say those words. 

I have tried to ascend downwards again, to the pits of language and eternal existences. It seems I am stuck in the Kingdom, its rules engraved on me, the passage is now impossible for me to get through. I will melt here from incompatibility until my death.

Inspired by Mulholland Drive by David Lynch, this work aims to examine the inversion of reality, of what we call the truth and fiction. The box acts as a portal filled with promises - but only offers deceit.

It's all an illusion!