How Can i Be Without Border?

2024

Algae Harvested from Central Park, Vegetable Glycerine, Water, Oil Paint, Acetone, Ink, NYC Curbside Compost.

Composting Communications: How Can i Be Without Border?

The corpse (or cadaver: cadere, to fall), that which has irremediably

come a cropper, is cesspool, and death; it upsets even

more violently the one who confronts it as fragile and fallacious

chance. A wound with blood and pus, or the sickly, acrid smell

of sweat, of decay, does not signify death. In the presence of

signified death—a flat encephalograph, for instance—I would

understand, react, or accept. No, as in true theater, without

makeup or masks, refuse and corpses show me what I permanently

thrust aside in order to live. These body fluids, this

defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with

difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am at the border of

my condition as a living being. My body extricates itself, as

being alive, from that border. Such wastes drop so that I might

live, until, from loss to loss, nothing remains in me and my

entire body falls beyond the limit—cadere, cadaver.

-      Julia Kristeva, Approaching Abjection[1]

"I am researching the permeability of boundaries—between life and death, self and other, human and more-than-human. Through concepts like Stacy Alaimo's trans-corporeality, Anne Carson's Eros, and Karen Barad's intra-action, I wrestle with the idea of touch, desire, and the impossibility/possibility of dissolving the boundaries between self and other (me and you). These reflections have culminated in a turn toward composting—not as disappearance but as a process of translation, regeneration, and connection. Ultimately, composting becomes both a metaphor and a practice, embodying the continual interplay of decay and renewal, the breaking of borders, and the profound intimacy of existing within a shared and cyclical world."