For my second project, I drew on an experience I had when I was 23. It's a little hard to describe because I don't know what words to use. There was someone I thought was my friend. Some people might say that what he did constituted a sexual assault. At best, it was very coercive. At worst, it was a kind of rape. The main thing is, something happened that I didn't want, and I felt violated, but I blamed myself for what happened and it has been bothering me for years.

The idea for my project came from reading Hakim Bey's chapter in TAZ about putting a curse on evil entities like corporations. At first I was thinking about cursing the person who hurt me. But the more I thought about it, the more I thought that instead of putting a curse on him I just wanted to free myself from the guilt and pain that his actions had caused me. So I shifted to thinking about some kind of exorcism ceremony.

I read up on different magical traditions and ideas about the significance of different elements (shapes, colors, herbs, stones, etc.) for exorcism, cleansing, etc. I got some advice from a woman at Natural Magic. I got a bunch of stuff together--a big piece of canvas to use as a surface, black paint, a black candle, crystals, a bunch of dried wormwood. I came up with a series of actions to perform that didn't conform to any sort of unified magical tradition but that spoke to me personally. I did a lot of writing and collected some scraps of paper representing ideas and feelings I wanted to rid myself of.

I wanted to do the ceremony alone, so I needed to document it. At first I was going to do the most basic sort of recording, with a static camera on a tripod. But once I got into the process, I ended up doing most of my shooting hand-held, and the project became more of a film and less of a no-frills recording of an action. A lot of the ceremony was about destroying representations of things that were painful. I got really into recording the dissolution of the burning paper and particularly the melting of a black candle I inscribed with words. By the end of the filming my footage was so close to the subject that it became almost abstract. I wasn't thinking about it, but the way the objects in the film became less recognizable meshed with the way they were burning and melting away.

I called the video "Catharsis," because that was what I was aiming for in performing the ritual. I can't say that doing it made all my bad feelings about the traumatic event go away, but it was a helpful step that got me moving towards healing in some ways.