Breached Bodies
Fear of transgressions from toxins, parasites, and other corporeal invasions is fundamentally a disease at how bodies become *other.* It is a turn towards the unsettling ways that bodies are breached, and what imaginaries keep us in avoidance of our already-invaded, already-monstrous selves. How might we proactively figure ourselves as mircoplastic-chimeras or part-microbial-beings that may always remain somewhat alien to our subjectivity? Holobiont selfhood, or subjecthood augmented with DIY symbiont prosthetics, has been the task of many artists and filmmakers, including Heather Dewey-Hagborg, Dune & Raby, Burton Nitta, and Ryder Cooley (who has a bloodletting practice with the hirudin leeches she keeps as pets). In an ongoing piece of my own (recently exhibited at EMPAC in Troy, NY), a feral kind of Anthropocene cathedral is filled with microscope videos of the pervasive microplastics in local tap Troy water.
Scholar Michelle Murphy suggests we have to start from life already altered by ecological violence; Alexis Shotwell, in Against Purity, puts forth a model of disability studies in which solidarity comes not from identity politics, but from identifying towards the shared non-able-bodied experiences.
We share a poetic meditation from Hana van der Kolk—a captivating artist, dancer, and embodied learning facilitator in the Hudson Valley (NY). Their work is an entrancing blend of artistic research, performance, workshop, invitation, gesture, and celebration, and it often deals with becomings, attending to the recognition of our already multiple selves. We share "What Do You Want to Become?" by van der Kolk, from their performance A Remnant, An Alien, A Wave, a performance of "hacked strategies for personal and collective transformation—an assemblage of presences and absences, a prayer for otherwise in a fake religion."
