ANJU MARIE KASTURIRAJ 

ANJU MARIE KASTURIRAJ

Autofiction 1 (2024). Letterpress prints, blood.

Autofiction 1 is a two-part performatively assembled text. The phantom image was made with a traditional letterpress, white ink, and a drop of blood from my index finger. My work frames performance as materiality and as a method of making objects through rituals. With the exception of a quote that appears towards the end of the text, I limited myself to using a singular type-case. This forced me to create codes with numbers and symbols when the letters I needed ran out. The text took 18 hours to assemble and print, and the process served as a meditation on the ownership and loss of narrative autonomy.

The original text is from a handwritten surrealist automatism project titled Venerative Autofiction, which details my personal experiences with South Indian coming of age rites, intercut with prose confronting the politics of desire.