ADMISSION:
Admission is free. RSVP beginning Monday, January 5, 2026, at 10 a.m.

DESCRIPTION:
“A multilayered perspective on artist Fakir Musafar’s life to creatively excavate his role as a pioneer of extreme body modification.”—Hyperallergic

“Part alt-cultural timeline, part essay on communal support, the film is an open-minded portrait of an iconoclast that serves to illuminate entire communities, while also noting the audacity of Fakir's borrowings. It's almost too much to digest in one viewing...a visceral impact.”—Screen Slate

A Body To Live In is a feature-length film about Fakir Musafar, cultural icon and founder of the modern primitives movement. Documenting the trajectory of Musafar’s art career and philosophy, including his early experiments in body play and his photographic works from the 1940s and ’50s, the film also traces the body modification movement and its intersection with BDSM as it emerged in LGBTQ+ subculture in the early 1970s. A screening of the documentary will be followed by a conversation between filmmaker Angelo Madsen and performance artist Ron Athey (who is also featured in the film), moderated by ONE Archives curator Quetzal Arévalo.

Content Warning: This event and trailer contain imagery and discussions of piercing, suspension, and nudity. Viewer discretion advised.

Bios:
Quetzal Arévalo (they/them) is the Getty Marrow Emerging Professionals Curatorial Assistant at ONE Archives at the USC Libraries. They are the curator of —NEED ME—or, (de)mystifying the myth of the modern primitive (debuting at ONE Archives in February 2025), a show of archival objects, artworks, and interventions that presents the western renaissance of body piercing as definitively queer history rooted in the sexual underground. They were a co-curator of Sci-Fi, Magick, Queer L.A.: Sexual Science and the Imagi-Nation (Aug. 2024–Mar. 2025); The Space We Take: Portraits from the Archive (Jun. 2025–Jan. 2026); and Robert Andy Coombs: No Content Warning (Jun.–Sept. 2025). Before their curatorial fellowship at ONE Archives at the USC Libraries, they graduated from UC Berkeley's History of Art department with a departmental citation award and the highest university honors. Their current research at ONE explores body modification, kink, counterculture, and all of their luscious intersections.

Ron Athey has been working at the vanguard of performance art for 25 years. Self-taught, he developed his work out of post-punk/pre-goth scenes, beginning with Premature Ejaculation (PE), an early-1980s collaboration with Rozz Williams. Their approach to performance art was informed by the club actions of Johanna Went, the formulation of Industrial culture, and the idea of psycho/neuro acoustics in sound performance. In the 1990s, Athey formed a company of performers and made Torture Trilogy, a series of works that addressed the AIDS pandemic directly through memorializing and philosophical reflection. In the 2000s, Athey developed genre-stretching theatrical works like Joyce and The Judas Cradle, and a series of major solo performances such as The Solar Anus, Sebastiane, Self-Obliteration Solo, and Incorruptible Flesh. Currently, Athey is presenting Acephalous Monster, a performance with projections, readings, lectures, appropriated text, and sound.

Angelo Madsen (previously known as Madsen Minax) is a filmmaker, visual artist, and educator. His projects consider how human relationships are woven through personal and collective histories, cultures, and kinships. Madsen’s works have shown at Berlinale, Toronto International Film Festival, Tribeca Film Festival, HotDocs, BAM CinemaFest, Art of the Real, BFI, Edinburgh International Film Festival, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Leslie Lohman Museum, Outfest, Newfest, Frameline, and dozens of LGBT film festivals internationally. His film North By Current (2021) aired on season 34 of POV (PBS) and won both a Cinema Eye Award and an IDA Award for Best Writing. A New York Times Critics Pick, North By Current has been called “A beautiful, complex wonder of a film” by Rolling Stone. Madsen teaches video art at the University of Vermont and is a Queer|Art Mentor, a United States Artists fellow, and a Guggenheim fellow.

Related Event:
A Body To Live In
Director’s Workshop and Exhibition Tour
Friday, February 27, 2026, from 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.
ONE Archives at the USC Libraries
For more info, click HERE.

Presented by USC Visions and Voices. Organized by Quetzal Arévalo (ONE Archives at the USC Libraries), Luka Fisher (Curatorial Studies), and Alexis Bard Johnson (ONE Archives at the USC Libraries).