Enacting Parts (Traces - 04/2021)

What could emerge from the experience of using all my senses to engage with items that have lost their purpose? Might life exist in the torn edges of a chair or emerge in the pit of my stomach? How can an object made for a fleeting purpose, never just go away? How can the ongoing activity of these life-forms be made visible in the human psyche? Once visible, what impact might that have?

What has emerged from this project is not only the recognition and embodiment of throwaway objects as active agents within our domestic and natural spaces, but also within our bodies, our memories, and all non-physical parts of our being. This work intends to engage in dialogue with objects in order to trouble and make visible some intricacies of late capitalism and anthropocentrism in a time of reemergence. 

Text on chair

When I touch you, I feel your breath. I feel the pulsation of your fibres as they flicker in the soft wind. I feel the subtle fluctuations in tension across your seams, left behind by fleshy bodies cradled on your surface. When I touch you, I feel the gentle texture of fibres, polluted by dust, sand, soil, and soot. The tiny grains roll off your surface making their way to the ground beneath you. I feel us lose them. When I touch your damaged edges, the soft, and delicate wisps of thread flutter across my fingertips almost too quickly to absorb their presence. I feel your cold metal frame and the bumps and divots from long winters outside in prairie storms. Still strong, it attempts to maintain any semblance of your purpose. When I touch you, I feel the pressure on the soles of my feet, as I rocked myself backward. When I touch you I feel my belly brace before sinking, briefly, like at the top of a rollercoaster, weightless.

When I smell your surface, I breathe the soil and all the microbes that penetrate your body. I smell the oils off our bodies lounging in the sun. I smell the book I read as I nestled into you in the morning sun during a slow time, like no other. I smell the winter. I smell the heat. The smell makes me imagine the networks active amongst your threads and in your crevices. I smell the cheap beer and spitty chew of a friend of a friend. When I smell you, I smell the grass that grew next to where you lived. I smell herbaceous spices that absorbed into my fingertips. Your smell is unstable and dynamic, like many who have felt you. When I smell you, I imagine the other ways you have smelled. I imagine you smelled of something new, chemical and sanitary emerging from a box. When I smell you, I imagine the life you lived before me, on a shelf, in a store, in production. I imagine the hands that have touched you, that made you. I imagine the upheaval of resources from our lands, seas, and soils, which have allowed me to smell you.

When I see you, I see a purpose lost. I see a metal frame holding together the torn fabric laced to its surface. I see a tiny pillow, not large enough for indulgent comfort. I see your destiny just north of here, amongst other broken things, decaying matter, the overconsumed, and their byproducts. I see the way your torn body shivers in the wind. I see that you are scared. I see the way you have changed. I see the way that you became your biome, full of living breathing and enacting parts. I see you outstretched in the elements, and folded in the wind. I see you make yourself small. When I see you, I see that your colours are mottled with new textures and shapes emerging from your surface. I see the water that has hit you. I imagine some running below you into the earth and some absorbing into your porous surface, changing you, enacting on you, before evaporating into the clouds. When I see you, I see how you are active like the weeds in the garden, the soil beneath you, like the hail that hit you, and the heat that surrounds you.

When I see you, I see myself during golden hour, hastily flopping onto you, feeling safe, yet trapped. I see myself sinking back into you before sinking too far, my face red with heat. I see my body folded through you. When I look at you, I see myself at 12, conscious for the first time of my rapidly changing body. I see myself bleeding, smelling, and truly sweating for the first time. When I look at you, I see my uncertainty and feel my heart racing as the seat below me snapped, quietly i'm sure, but loud enough to send a familiar tremor through my body. When I see you, I feel the pinch that shot through me when I was eight. When I see you, I hear the sound of the wood hitting the floor, and I feel the shame rise within me, as I fell in slow motion. When I see you, I see the stories that you embody and the bodies that you have held. 

Text in book

When I felt you for the first time, my fingers pressed into your surface, flattening the tiny nodes that make up your body into the shape of my clenched fingertips. When I feel you, I feel anticipation of getting past you, getting to hold whatever shiny, plastic, new thing he had purchased. When I feel you, I feel that ting through my body of the static electricity surging through you, the cardboard, and eventually my person. When I feel you, I feel the joy of something new emerging, and the guilt of excess eventually embodied in that choice. When I feel you, my fingers squeal across your body, skin and nails to the whitest of made-made flesh, somehow, magically charging my body, erecting the hairs on my arms.

When I smell you, I smell the sterility that only something born in a factory can smell of. When I smell you, I smell the emptiness of a life's purpose already lived, and an inevitable destiny of wriggling, emerging, and being buried, amongst decay. When I smell you, I smell the dust in the basement and the vinyl wrapping on the walls that keeps it dry. When I smell you, I understand your fleeting purpose, protector of someone else, something else that you cannot protect anymore.

When I see you, I see the tiny round beads that make up your body. When I see you, I see the way you break apart into tiny nodes, full of energetic potential, clinging to your body, my finger, and then every crevice. When I see you, I see a fragment of your body dancing across the shore, hitting stone after stone, pushed wave after wave, abandoned yet home. When I see you, I smell the salty, fishy, mildew, of a breeze across that shore, and I feel the waters that fed my mother, where my grandfather made ends meat. When I see you, I see your beuancy as a mode of survival in an ocean that could drown almost anything. When I see you, I see how you were formed and pressed into shape for something/ someone else's purpose. When I see you, I see how you were made to accommodate something else. I see the crack in your side, because you didn't really matter.

When I touch you, I feel how fragile you are, yet I also see how the tiny fragments of your body have the potential to fly through the air, finding their emergent purpose elsewhere. When I see you, I feel the purgatory you are in, close to your destined site, so close that you could float in the wind, right back to the brush that lines the trails I walk.