MY BODY IS AN ARCHIVE, NOT A CAGE
My Body Is an Archive, Not a Cage is a performance film that recounts the story of a cyber seraph from the future who returns to the present to share her testimony after years of enduring microaggressions. In her final act of breath and remembrance, she embodies resilience and reclamation. The Cyber Seraph figure is inspired by the Anti-Electra archetype — a mythic counterpoint to inherited narratives of obedience and grief.
As a video work, it posits the corporeal form as a living repository of memory, lineage, and resistance. Rather than a site of containment, the body becomes a vessel that archives ancestral signals, trauma, and speculative futures. Through gestural performance and sonic texture, the film insists that embodiment is not confinement but transmission — a porous boundary where past, present, and possibility converge — a reclamation of the body as an active site of remembering and becoming.
Artist
Pearlyn Lii
Team
Nicolas Croes (Director), Jesus Torrivilla (Editorial Development, Story), Galia Eibenschutz (Performer), Taüs Jafar (Music), Santiago Camacho (AC), Giuseppe Ayanegui (Costume), Jon-Luke Fillippi (Build), Hsiao-Ying Yang (Build Assist), Mariana Palacios (Hair), Andres Mañon (MUA), Sara Moreno (PM), Elena Sotos (Assistant), Federico Cortés (Guide & Translation)
Before getting her wings, the Cyber Seraph was a radical digital theorist who used to park her motorcycle at the university’s forefront. Students knew her from the classroom and from the rundown warehouses where she used to play as DJ Elektra. She made herself a name in the underground mastering analog synthesizers with traditional instruments — her most legendary one was a modded harp that sounded like hell and heaven merged for a night in a dirty basement. Her livestreams gave her a cult following.
An electronic producer and a theorist are not different in method: they sample a tradition to build a future. In her work as an academic, she founded “The feminine macro-archive of male micro-aggressions”, a collection of testimonies of violence against women in the public digital and physical space. More than a dusty collection of words, that archive became an excuse for women to come to her and tell their stories. In her DJ booth, she was a redeemer of pain who turned all troubles into euphoria; in her university cubicle, she was a confessor and a gentle soul to lean on.
Pearlyn Lii. My Body is an Archive, Not a Cage. 2022. Installation view, JO-HS, Mexico City. Image captured by Nicolás Croes, courtesy of nonstudio, New York.
