Obdurate: Will Troiani

Artist statement

Obdurate names a heightened form of stubbornness. A will set like stone. There is beauty in such resolve: mastery, rigor, and moral conviction often depend on the refusal to give in.

Yet stone does not bend. And when life demands movement, refusal becomes friction. Friction becomes dissonance. Dissonance becomes pain.

I have carried both the strength and the cost of this trait. With this piece, I invite others who have been both punished and rewarded by their own inflexibility to consider a shared question: what do we do when we are the Obdurate one?

Orchestration: mastery is represented by drum-kit performance, beauty by musical composition. The philosophy is carried by spoken word and poetry projected as video. Other forms of obduracy are explored through artistic collaborations.