I wanted the music to be disruptive and delirious—in fact, a waltz drives the edit of the first part, the “Roach-eye view.” This section isn't actually cut, it's "scratched." That is, I shot a long pan around the room, a circle. I’m not sure how a cockroach would look around a room and I imagined it would be frenetic, but contained—very like the form of Lispector's novel. In the novel, time is gradually destabilized, even irrelevant. Once I had the clip in the editor, I screen-recorded the monitor while I scrubbed back and forth on the timeline to the beat of the waltz, just like a DJ.

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Clarice Lispector was a Brazilian novelist of the 60s, a favorite of the theorist Hélène Cixous, who was influential to me as a young artist. Lispector's novel, The Passion According to G.H., describes at its climax a moment of fellow-theorist and feminist Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection, where the inside crosses the boundary to the outside—the guts of the smashed roach ooze out—and cross another boundary when the woman puts the mess into her mouth.

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The setting for this great adventure of the soul is domestic, even claustrophobic. Everything

happens in the maid's room at the back of the elegant apartment. But that may be the point.

Only the jolt of seeing herself through the eyes of her former maid can set G.H. on the road to freedom. Lispector's cunning mixture of Sartrean and Christian terms carries a strong social

message. In a master-slave relation, neither is free. Blessed are the poor in spirit. Liberation

for the penthouse can only come from the favela. G.H.'s education in the maid's room has

at least a poetic justice, as a stand-in for the missing social justice in Brazil.

—By Suzanne Ruta, New York Times

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The last section is inspired by Chick Strand’s 1986 film Artificial Paradise and the sound by John Smith's Girl Chewing Gum.

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