Interview with Jules Fischer

by Miriam Frandsen

Jules Fischer is currently reworking their performance Lesions for Toaster at Husets Teater. The piece premiered in Oslo at UKS (Unge Kunstneres Samfund) with three performers. In this version, it will be a solo performance. I meet Jules for a very generous and personal conversation about the work in their studio in Rysgade.

What is the artistic motivation behind Lesions? How did the idea come about?

The idea for Lesions arose during the Copenhagen Pride in 2022. It was a summer of extreme heat, prolonged drought, and I felt that the earth was burning. That year, only the commercial Pride took place; smaller local initiatives weren’t included. I was standing there sweating, handed a 7-Eleven “Pride” water while a “Pride” burger was being sold nearby. Pride has evolved into a massive capitalist game, consuming both us and the resistance itself. It creates a sense of powerlessness. Wherever we try to resist, it gets absorbed and turned into even more destructive consumption. It all felt so ******, honestly, and out of that frustration came this angry rant, which is the foundation of Lesions. The first draft of the text was written that night when I got home. I felt like we were floating on a Titanic raft, and I was unsure what the right thing to do was: Should we just try to love until the end? Or should we acknowledge that there’s no more time for intimate relationships and instead focus on saving what can still be saved in society? Where should we direct our energy? On the big picture or the small one? These questions led to this angry textual attack on that very ambivalence. The anger opened something up, but it took some time before I picked it up again.

At the same time, I became deeply interested in hormones in general, both in relation to hormone therapy and because I wanted to become pregnant. Hormonal treatments for trans people are still relatively new from a medical perspective, and there’s a lack of research. Birth control pills are the most studied hormonal treatment regarding side effects, but to me, they’re a wild example of how female bodies have been controlled without fully considering the risks of being on the pill. Meanwhile, general medical research is focused on men because women’s hormonal fluctuations are deemed too complicated. Hormones are also in the water and everywhere. The societal discourse and approach to hormonal changes and treatments are very complex. Some issues are silenced, while others are heavily problematized and given massive societal attention.

There are no hormonal treatments specifically designed for trans people; the medications used were developed for other purposes. Trans women, for instance, might take birth control pills and testosterone blockers initially developed for cardiovascular diseases, while the testosterone that trans men take is marked with bold warnings that “women” absolutely must not use it. We still don’t fully understand the side effects of that can occur after starting hormonal treatments. If it’s hormonal contraception with societal relevance, it’s deemed perfectly safe, despite evidence that, for example, hormonal IUDs contribute to breast cancer. However, when it comes to trans people, whose lives depend on HRT (hormone replacement therapy), society becomes highly focused on protecting their health—essentially making access to treatment extremely difficult. Women’s bodies are simply valued less, and trans bodies are practically disregarded. This angers me. Yet, it is the female body that carries the cyclical processes also found in nature. The same connections and systems exist, and they play a significant role in the text of Lesions. I quote Paul B. Preciado, who quotes Silvia Federici, her research, and her critique of the separation of our bodies from nature and what this means in a capitalist setup that seeks to align the human body with market logic.

I don’t see my work as explicitly activist or political; I’m just overwhelmed by the ambivalence around hormones because I, too, want to take various hormones, while living in a body that hasn’t been thoroughly researched and has been suppressed for centuries.

I try to embrace the complexity I experience and work with it artistically, perhaps to understand it better. The ambivalence and complexity are real. In general, I want to make room for this duality, acknowledging that this is how things are—they are neither one nor the other. The text in Lesions is a kind of collage with references to Testo Junkie by Paul B. Preciado, the TV show Designing Women, the film Little Women, the poem The Hills We Climb, and Charlie Chaplin’s The Dictator. Visually, I’m very drawn to surrealism, a kind of formal uncanniness, and old Hollywood drama. All of this aligns well with exploring facades and the absurdity of gender construction.

That Pride event, among other experiences, made me reflect on what it means to be part of a community that has endured so much rejection. Everyone carries wounds from early childhood, but when you’re marginalized, you’ve often felt deeply wrong and perhaps lost trust in other people and society. What does it mean to live in a community where everyone is so wounded, yet everyone tries to heal each other? When you’ve been rejected, bullied, or disowned by your family, you become highly sensitive to rejection, and you’re likely very good at rejecting others yourself. I’ve started thinking a lot about this defense mechanism and exploring it in my work.

In Lesions, there’s an interplay between societal wounds and the individual traumas we all carry because the two are interconnected. The version coming to Toaster at Husets Teater focuses heavily on intimacy issues and the distance we create between ourselves and each other.

What parameters are you most interested in exploring with the performance and exhibition? You had an exhibition in connection with Lesions in Oslo, didn’t you? What are you investigating?

Lesions in the context of Toaster is a further development of a performance and exhibition I created in Oslo in the fall of 2024. It involved a light and sound installation, along with other visual works included in the exhibition. It was more of a spatial experience. It’s challenging to ensure that an exhibition and a performance achieve the same effect since they are two distinct forms. However, I tried to play with the relationship between exhibition and performance. For instance, in Oslo, two performances overlapped. The idea was to avoid creating one monumental performance and instead lean into a “live exhibition,” with multiple performances occurring simultaneously.

One of the other performances, Perfect Lovers, took place inside Lesions. This allowed me to experiment with the different expectations audiences have of exhibitions versus performances and explore how these two formats can adopt conventions from each other. In an exhibition, it’s common to have multiple works coexisting, but you rarely see two performances happening simultaneously. That’s exactly what I tried here.

What kind of audience interaction are you working with, if any?

There’s always a significant consideration of the audience in my work. In Lesions, distance plays a crucial role—it’s part of the form. The performance is lip-synced, alternating between full spotlight and shadow, where the performer attempts to engage with the audience more intimately. The audience can move freely around the space, and we use the lighting in a way that also illuminates the audience, putting them in the spotlight as well.

When a performer stands on stage, they are often blinded by the light and can’t see the audience. This is likely not something audiences think much about, but performers often can’t see a thing because the lights are so intense. I find this aspect of theater fascinating: we meet in an intimate, live setting, but in reality, there’s this “fourth wall,” where the performer speaks out into a vast darkness, while those in the darkness observe. This dynamic becomes a sort of mirror that I find fun to play with, especially in relation to intimacy issues—wanting to be seen, but not too closely.

In Lesions, the dramatic action revolves around the tension of who the light shines on—or doesn’t. The lamp becomes a symbol of the attention we can give or withhold from one another, for better or worse. For minorities, this can manifest as a hypersensitivity to visibility. Entering a space can feel like everyone is thinking, “Oh, here comes the queer person or the non-white person”. The paradox of being both highly visible and simultaneously ignored is something the lighting explores.

For example, we don’t exist in research statistics. Nobody knows what to do when you show up at a fertility clinic and want to have a child. This ambivalence is made physical and concrete in the performance through light—either being fully exposed or entirely overlooked. The performer also interacts with the lamp itself, observing what it does, rather than only being illuminated by it. This becomes an exploration of what’s possible when there’s no light at all.

I’m interested in exploring and breaking down hierarchies in my art, including dissolving professional hierarchies, like distinguishing between whether someone is a singer or a dancer, as I did in Dryppende Stof. In Lesions, the lamp itself becomes the main character, while the performer takes on a supporting role in a sense.

What do you hope Lesions will make the audience think about?

I hope they experience an ambivalence between distance and closeness—that the performance can reflect their own potential ambivalence. At the same time, there are several facts embedded in the text that they might ponder. Ideally, the audience becomes part of the investigation, as it can continue within them.

What would be the next natural experiment for you following this production?

Lesions are referring to injuries in the tissue. But I haven’t yet reached the deepest wounds. Without making any promises, I imagine the next step might involve going even deeper. Since I started creating performances, I’ve worked with the idea of community in various forms. Yet, implicitly, there has always been an undercurrent suggesting that some are excluded—that rejection or misunderstanding exists somewhere.

In Dryppende Stof, I explored inclusion and positive community, but even in that celebration, there’s a pain underneath. Now, I’m becoming interested in what’s inside ourselves. There’s something within me that has surfaced in all the works I thought were about something else, and now I want to understand what that really is? Can I delve further beneath the surface?

I feel aligned with Alok Vaid-Menon’s perspective that love has the power to heal. Maybe we need to find ourselves before we can go out and save the world. Relationships are difficult—but why? Because we’re constantly triggered by our own wounds and patterns. Everyone knows the feeling of rejection; it’s part of being human.

What if we could show care and try to heal ourselves and each other? Love and the body are revolutionary forces, and if we were more connected, I don’t think capitalism would make sense.