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.
À travers l'installation, la vidéo, la sculpture, la performance et la poésie, P. Staff (né en 1987 à Bognor Regis, Angleterre, vit et travaille à Los Angeles) explore la manière dont l'histoire, la technologie, le capitalisme et le droit transforment les corps. Avec un intérêt tout particulier pour le désir, la vulnérabilité et l'expérience de la perte, sa pratique met en lumière la façon dont les structures de pouvoir contraignent, modèlent et invisibilisent les corps issus des communautés marginalisées – notamment celles des personnes queer, trans ou invalidées.
Se distinguant par sa finesse et sa pertinence critique, l'œuvre de P. Staff est résolument ancrée dans le présent, autant par son choix de médiums – de l'installation holographique aux sculptures convoquant des technologies de pointe – que par son questionnement des formes visibles et invisibles de la violence et du pouvoir.
L'espace d'exposition lui-même est devenu un medium central dans la pratique de P. Staff. Des éléments tels que la lumière et la couleur - de même que l'expérience sensorielle d'entrer, se déplacer et de sortir d'une pièce - sont méticuleusement chorégraphiés pour créer des atmosphères intenses, souvent déstabilisantes, qui marquent durablement celles et ceux qui en font l'expérience.
