Set You Free - Holly Warcup

Set You Free by Holly Warcup

This beguiling thing.
A flip book, on a key ring, made from a single scatophillia pornographic photo repeated, with the words from N-Trance’s 1995 hit song, ‘Set you free’ hollowed of it’s anthemic music.
Through the publications disjointed and raving temporality, bodies become extended, externalised and twisted in a media landscape of endless archives and pleasure continually replaying from a haunted past.
N’trance’s euphoric words when printed become strange, mournful and dry. “I want this night to last forever.” A plea for nostalgia, memories that never disappear, songs that never finish.
The words say “Oh Yeah, Oh Yeah, Oh Yeah. Oh Yeah.” Fetishes lose their touch with desire, they are not representations of an endlessly unknowable interiority, but instead a trained techno ache, like Pavlov’s dogs panting to sound systems.
In this booklet culture is rendered as an act of endlessly picking over our own detritus, the study of scatology. An obsession and revulsion with consumption and decomposition. The image of pornography repeats, the words droll on in a detached repetition, meaning only begins to accumulate in the flip books speed. A repeating waste again and again.
Mirroring the repetition of electronic music; the colours, text and image materialise in a mesh of colour and dissipation, mirroring the builds and drops of a sugary sweet trance song in all its beautiful consumerism.
It is hard to tell, maybe this all about just eating shit.
Bound by a key ring it wants to attach to you, to cling to your body, to extend your body.
Holly’s publication is not an object of purity, it offers an ambiguous look into what constitutes a contemporary desire and begs the question, how do we set a body free?

‘Set You Free’ by Holly Warcup - £8
Three colour risograph.
Eyelet bound.
Split ring included.
100 Pages.
5x5cm.
Printed in the UK.
2025.