Cuteness is not gentleness

When Sianne Ngai talks about cuteness, she completely exposes my entire visual strategy. She writes: “Cuteness is the affective management of power imbalances.” That made me realize—I don’t use “girly,” “soft,” or “pink” materials because I find them genuinely cute. I use them to disarm the viewer, to create a sugar-coated threshold through which I can smuggle in discomfort, failure, and misrecognition.

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It’s not decoration—it’s a trap. A structure.

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When Barthes writes in Adorable! that some emotions are the result of language collapsing, it resonates with the way I leave gaps, glitches, and awkward silences in my video editing. I’m not being deep—I just genuinely can’t say it. The pause itself becomes the limit of language.