AFFRAYER

CW: A whole heaping of utopian fascist aesthetics, as is appropriate to the genre. All images taken in situ at the Wallace Collection in London. You are a teenager, or maybe in your early twenties. Your home is under threat - actually the whole planet is under threat, everything you love, everyone you know, all of their small human dramas - and so you have joined the military as a volunteer, to defend everyone, all of this. They gave you a sharp blue uniform, and six months of training on their bases on the moon. The battlefields that will decide the fate of every human will not be on earth. Your training is with the weapon, the body, which is really two bodies, one hot and one cold - but we will come back to this later. While you train you get to know the other volunteers. They are people of all kinds, from every class and age and nation imaginable. They are the whole world, and they bring with them its chaos and its human dignity. You all speak Common, of course, just like your…