Fellow Project
2025–2026
Amok Anatomy of the Normal
This project investigates forms of violence within Western democracies, focusing on the interrelation between individual acts, political dynamics and white middle-class identity. Specifically, it explores amok—a relatively recent phenomenon of extreme, gender-specific violence—as a potential lens through which to unfold a certain double character of the current social order.
Using real case studies from Switzerland dating back to 1986 and examining crime prevention strategies for managing such cases in the future, the project seeks to approach the considerable area in which the complex causality of contemporary mass murder can neither be precisely calculated nor fully comprehended. At this moment, when reasons elude the classical disciplines and their logic of utilization—natural sciences, behavioral sciences, modern criminology—what can artistic practice add?
Drawing on two predecessor models analyzed—the medialized serial killer and the anonymous neo-fascist terrorist, both sharing notable features with the amok runner—and by appropriating modes of early reality TV, the research results in fictional episodes with exemplary figures not defined by deviance, but by norm. With this method, the project seeks to test the possibilities of seeing despite the impossibilities of showing, thus highlighting the relevance of artistic practice in times of bewilderment.
