Full Rotation brings together texts and images to trace the forces that draw bodies beyond themselves. Moving between ecstasy, animal life, and light, the book explores heightened sensation, altered perception, and dissolution, where the human gives way to other forms of existence and boundaries between the physical, psychic, and cosmic begin to blur.
Full Rotation is an artist book by P. Staff organized around three terms: "Ekstase," "Animals," and "Light." Chosen and assembled by Staff, the essays, poems and artworks move without hierarchy between the clinical, the erotic, the zoological and the cosmological, bringing different systems of knowledge into contact and allowing unexpected affinities to emerge. Rather than establishing a unified argument, the book unfolds through encounters, associations and shifts in perspective, exploring the body as a site where physical sensation, desire, vulnerability and transformation converge.
A constellation of texts spans the poem, the polemic, the letter, the elegy, hybrid verse and anthropological essay. Artworks by Käthe Kollwitz, Valie Export, Aura Rosenberg,
Pati Hill, Catherine Opie and Luigi Russolo are interleaved with Staff's own drawings and images, creating a field of correspondences across different historical moments, artistic practices and modes of representation.
Across the book, ecstasy emerges as both a bodily experience and a disruption of the self: a state in which pleasure, pain, excess and surrender unsettle the boundaries of individual identity. Animality offers a related perspective, challenging the divisions between human and nonhuman, instinct and reason, the organic and the artificial. Light, in turn, appears as a force of illumination and exposure, but also of instability and transformation—a phenomenon that makes visible while exceeding the limits of perception. Together, these three terms open onto questions of how bodies are constituted, how they encounter other forms of life, and how they are altered by forces that cannot be fully contained or understood.
The resulting structure is cyclical rather than linear, inviting connections to recur and meanings to shift as the reader moves through the book.
Full Rotation treats the page as a space of circulation in which images and texts are continually reconfigured, resisting fixed distinctions between bodies and environments, sensation and knowledge, the intimate and the universal. Physical ecstasy, animality and illumination become three vantage points from which to consider what exceeds, consumes and transforms the body—and the possibility of inhabiting forms of existence beyond its presumed limits.
Born 1987 in Bognor Regis (England), P. Staff lives and works in Los Angeles. Through installation, video, sculpture, performance and poetry, Staff's work explores the ways in which history, technology, capitalism and law transform the constitution of contemporary bodies, their tissues, their minds, and their social spheres. With a particular focus on desire, debility and dispossession, their practice mediates current biopolitical and necropolitical configurations through which bodies—particularly those belonging to marginalized communities—are disciplined and disregarded.
Distinct in its refinement, criticality, and timeliness, Staff's practice is eminently contemporaneous, both in its choice of media and materialization—from holographic film installations to sculptures made using cutting-edge scientific methods—and in its critical engagement with visible and invisible showings of violence and agency.
The exhibition space itself has increasingly become a central medium in their artistic practice. Elements such as lighting and color—along with the somatic and sensory experience of entering, moving through and exiting a space—are meticulously choreographed to create intense, sometimes unsettling, always profoundly affecting atmospheres.
