Alice Heyward and Juan Pablo Cámara in conversation on Homopticum by Juan Pablo Cámara with Andrey Bogush,at Sophiensæle (6 and 7 March 2026)
Homopticum expanded the theatre into a new environment. Through the construction and deconstruction of different bodies and beings, a weird, somewhat lurid world emerged, producing ambiguous, palpable experiences that invite consideration of the politics of vision.
A: The work ventured through spheres of social surveillance and invoked theatrical masking. Aesthetically and conceptually, it moved backward and forward in time, drawing on traditions of “world-making” in both cultural (theatre) and social (technology) spheres.
J: That movement in time resonates with me. This anachronism creates disorientation. I’m interested in “world-unmaking”; things can be re-oriented once disoriented.
We’re at a strange moment for the human body. Technology augments it, but so does our animality. We’re distanced from processes that once felt natural. That hybrid condition creates uncertainty about what is instinct, what is technology, or what is in between. I’m interested in that tension and its awkwardness.
A: Technology also limits how we orient through the body. Augmentation makes me think about “looksmaxxing”, the pursuit of extreme improvement and its online representation.
J: There’s pressure to maximise effectiveness and an obsession with optics, with the body as object. In Homopticum, I worked with dance as an object; something to be observed (and to observe back), tied to an attention economy. Optical framing constructs possibilities to test how we see and are seen. We’re constantly bombarded with things to look at and can forget how to see. Flashiness has gained value—that’s dangerous. The space between boredom and excitement interests me.
A: This piece gave me time to see. Forms weren’t flashed but emerged. I saw salsa, machinic isolation, voguing…
J: Traces of my relationship to movement; projections of myself, searching for in-betweens, something specific, a kind of idiosyncrasy.
A: My perception entered through form, moving my gaze through objectification into a psychological wasteland. Theatre became a zone of construction and transcendence.
J: The departure point was Paul B. Preciado’s Pornotopia, analysing the Playboy empire and Hefner’s bachelor apartments—spaces designed to facilitate sex and productivity, shaping masculinity.
From there, we considered domestic space as a producer of identity. Supposedly private, it no longer is so. This connects to Shoshana Zuboff’s surveillance capitalism: private experience becomes behavioural data, a “prediction product.” Behaviour is captured, shaped, and fed back into systems that can predict and manipulate us to keep us engaged, producing more data, and trapping us in forms of attending that corrode our autonomy.
A: Systems learn quickly through our use of them.
J: Yes. We constantly feed them, often without realising. Even if you know, it’s hard to escape. What is the cost? That labour produces a psychological wasteland.
A: These systems lie to please us. We’re deeply connected, but the connection is toxic.
J: The dystopia is a lack of control. I want to evoke that while also suggesting a space that disrupts prediction, where events are neither immediately functional nor predictable. An attention economy that emancipates rather than manipulates. Gratification may come, but only through strangeness or discomfort. When contrasting sensations appear side by side, logic can rupture. That space holds political power.
A: A dramaturgy through an unpredictable, fleshy cybersphere. How do we live with our prostheses? How do we find agency?
J: I believe unpredictability holds agency because prediction is how capitalism controls us.
A: It creates new relations if we work with it without domination.
J: Otherwise, we reproduce the same logic.
A: An uncanny awkwardness emerged. My attention expanded. By the end, I was observing what had happened to me. It became about how I look and, therefore, what I can see.
J: I think observing how we look today is an act of resistance.
A: Watching your shifting, multiplicitous body, I found myself differently; not through resolution, but strangeness.
J: Life is strange.
A: The piece also plays with multiple gazes in its creation. How did collaboration shape it?
J: The project began with visual artist Andrey Bogush; we developed the concept together through translation between disciplines. Then joined Joseph Wegmann (video/light), Lennard Schnitzler (costume), Mauro Guz Bejar (sound). The piece evolved across Helsinki, Argentina, and Berlin.
A: Negotiating many gazes, images, histories—the contemporary human condition that the work exposes.
Homopticum, the title, folds together optics, surveillance, and homo as sameness between subject and object, also pointing to how gay male cultures manifest through bodies and phones: construction and consumption through the gaze.
J: It also references the Panopticon, an architecture of constant, invisible surveillance that produces internalised control. That’s how we live now: the line between surveillance and self-surveillance is blurred.
A: During peak “cancel culture,” people watched one another, calling out poor “optics” in actions, often leading to (self-)censorship. Now surveillance feels larger, non-human, indiscriminate, with no guise of morality.
J: Ominous.
A: Insidious.
Homopticum by Juan Pablo Cámara with Andrey Bogush,was shown at Sophiensæle from 6 to 7 March 2026.
