“Mind Split = Siamese Twins” is a surrealistic steampunk performance that creates overlapping axes, firstly, through and between Friedrich Nietzsche’s early philosophical thought concerning the Apollonian and the Dionysian entities, the myth surrounding Friedrich Nietzsche’s mental breakdown in Turin 1889, and eventually considering Nietzsche’s correspondences to Cosima Wagner, signed as Dionysus, a moment where the unreal in Nietzsche’s life takes form.

Secondly, the happening creates four body-entities (characters) developed by mythological figures and narratives found in Greek mythology. The characters investigate sound and movement through wearable performative sound sculptures. The duality in the characters allows the happening to emerge through all the conflicts, co-existences, inter-communications, overlaps, oppositions, discussions, compressions, and repressions the creatures (performers) create. The hybrid nature of the characters draw attention to the possibility to observe and explore Dionysian and Apollonian states inside one another, and to question how and when one sees them in the state where they begin to exist simultaneously. The formulation happens in the in-between layers of information and noise.

Thirdly, the happening creates an axis to the working group’s autobiographical narratives related to traumatic events whereby derealization, a state of mind where reality ruptures, occurs. The third axis of “Mind Split = Siamese Twins” creates a bridge to Friedrich Nietzsche’s mental breakdown through sound and movement by affiliating noise with the Dionysian and information with the Apollonian. Through the third axis, derealization, the happening relates to the state where noise overcomes information, and therefore objects lose their identification (pre-identification). In derealization, the characters discharge their repressions until they themselves lose the sense of what is real, and consequently encourage the spectator to lose their sense of reality as well. The happening seizes the blurriness between information and noise, as well as the real and the imagined.

“Mind Split = Siamese Twins” imagines Nietzsche’s breakdown and creates a narrative where Nietzsche (as the absent author) visits his mental breakdown once again under an indeterminate derealized state. Through Nietzche’s imagined breakdown, the four body-entities emerge and take agency in the absent author’s mind and body. The happening begins with a dream-trip in the author’s derealized state while the spectators witness the state of pre-identification in a simultaneous co-existence; on the one hand, the past entertains the moment before “self-abandonment” and “loss of memory,” and on the other hand, the spectators witness the present where the happening seduces the suffering within the characters themselves.