You suffer, but you enjoy it.

The artist is on her knees, her back to the camera. She picks up a whip. She strikes herself. Her back reddens.

It's not penance. It's settling a score.

In this piece, the artist exposes her own methods of self-punishment: those that had accumulated over years of living a life on her own terms, in constant friction with the systems that dictated how she should behave, what she should desire, and who she should be. The punishment didn't come from outside. It came from within, with the precision of something deeply ingrained.

Jacques Lacan describes the death drive—the Todestrieb—not as a desire for destruction but as an active resistance to change: the subject's tendency to cling to their forms of suffering because these, paradoxically, provide enjoyment. Not the pleasure of well-being, but something darker and harder to let go of: the particular satisfaction of what hurts but feels familiar. The artist knew this pull. She refused to let go of her suffering precisely because it offered her something that stability could not. There is suffering, but also joy.

Michel Foucault (1975) points out that disciplinary institutions not only regulate the body from the outside, but achieve their deepest objective when the subject internalizes their mechanisms and becomes their own warder and executioner. Catholicism is, in this sense, one of the most effective disciplinary systems: it doesn't need to witness sin to punish it, because the punishment already occurs within. According to its tenets, it doesn't matter when the public sees this piece—there would always be a reason to punish oneself. Some thought, some desire, some behavior classified as sin will have taken place at some point. The body always owes something.

And yet, the artist takes up the whip herself.

That gesture changes everything. By making the punishment public, the artist wrests away from the system its most powerful tool: private guilt, the sin carried in silence, invisible and without witnesses. Exposing self-punishment before a camera is refusing to continue bearing it alone. It is about bringing out what the system needs to remain inside in order to function. In that act, punishment ceases to be discipline and becomes performance: it no longer belongs to the system that produced it, it belongs to her. Agency doesn't arrive despite the whip. It arrives through it.