She said she had spent her entire career attempting to understand herself as an image and her impossible desire to have no thoughts or feelings, to be just an object, and rather than feeling shame about that desire and repressing it, she has attempted to explore it as a means of locating her authentic self. At the time the Magnotta story first broke, she had been bombarded with interview requests from every sleazy blog and trash tabloid in the world and turned all of them down. Gia had two master’s degrees and was, quite possibly, the most articulate person I’d ever met, and if she couldn’t speak in thoughtful long-form about the construction of self as image then she wasn’t fucking interested.

“And yes, of course he was a sociopath. But then, we’re surrounded by sociopaths. People who don’t see the person inside another’s body. Most of the time they’re just disguised in suits or on lawn signs.”

And then I posed the question I couldn’t stop myself from asking: “Was he well endowed?”

“Jordan.”

I held her gaze. She puckered her lips and shifted them to the side of her face. “Yes.”

On some nights, during her week-long durational performance, Gia would work herself into a trance. She would wear a rubber pig mask while riding her exercise bike and flagellating herself. In one video she projected (which I had filmed, incidentally, a year or so earlier), she was naked in her real apartment and rubbing shit all over her body. Each night small crowds of friends and art-world types crammed themselves into Videofag to watch her enigmatic rituals. About halfway through the week, she began drawing images and writing cryptic messages across the walls with indelible black maker, which, for years after, and despite more than a half-dozen coats of white gallery paint, remained faintly visible.