Loose Holes is a self-published 24-page booklet/zine in which collage, drawing, and poetry operate as a system of interruption. Found pre-AIDS photographic material is damaged, erased, and re-sequenced to suspend its original function as pornography and to destabilise its role as an object of consumption. Poems function as captions rather than explanations, applying light textual pressure to the images. Through restraint, omission, and juxtaposition, the work produces meaning indirectly, allowing vulnerability to emerge where desire once operated efficiently.
The publication aligns this pre-AIDS gay male imagery with drawings of female Nazi concentration camp guards. This alignment does not propose equivalence but establishes a shared condition: the loss of body ownership under extreme structures of power. Bodies circulate as material, surface, and projection rather than as possessions. Responsibility and punishment remain intact, yet empathy is treated as a structural force rather than a moral choice—one that cannot be cleanly severed, only displaced. The work suggests that attempts to exclude certain bodies from empathy do not end violence but redirect it, ensuring that it ultimately circles back.
Loose Holes was featured in an exhibition in Bratislava (September 2022), at the same time that, across the street from the gallery, a 19-year-old murdered two men outside a gay bar before taking his own life. Slovak police said the attack was “motivated by hatred for sexual minorities.”
