Monsters of Circumstances — Keynote by Xavier Le Roy

Saturday, November15, 2025

7:30 PM - 9:00 PM

Tomorrow Maybe, 4/F, Eaton HK

As artificial creatures in the art world, are monsters built to frighten? Are they built from the intimate fears of their creators? Can we trace how monsters confront our fears? How do monsters embody the unknown? How do they represent things we fear or cannot control? What do monsters do for us, emotionally and/or intellectually?

Monsters may have escaped from fantasy worlds, books, films and theatrical stages. Once the camouflage of our fears, they may have migrated to live in the world of our current confusions, becoming the camouflages of our daily lives.

This performance is derived from a lecture made for the conference on “the staging of monstrous bodies and orders”. The monstrosity of its form and content pushed it out of the conference room to meet other spectators, and worlds other than the academy, in an attempt to diffract our present world. A world in which monsters have emerged from certain actions to intrude on our daily lives, to be among us, and within us. This performance looks at how monsters are made. This conference creates monsters, to generate a situation in which we are invited to re-evaluate our view of the other, our relationship to the strange, between the unacceptable and the acceptable, between the desirable and the undesirable.

And if we accept that monsters can help us pose the question of what is acceptable or desirable in human beings and in social contracts, could they help us create a utopian and desired environment? Could they build relationships between beings and help us overcome our fears of others and of the possible collapses that surround, approach and sometimes haunt us?

Cover image by Tamira Kalmbach.