(something requires care)
(care creates labour)
(labour creates residue)
(residue creates new conditions)
(new conditions require care)
Performance and installation form a temporary climate in which body, material, object, and environment enter relations of mutual dependency. Water functions as both material and infrastructure, continuously altering the conditions of the work through melting, saturation, drying, corrosion, evaporation, and accumulation. Rather than representing maintenance, the work produces conditions that make maintenance necessary.
The body does not direct the system but exists as one of its components. It is reorganised by the same material conditions it responds to: carrying, drying, wetting, waiting, and repeating.
Do you know what the broken neck of a
pigeon feels like?
It happened on the day the body decided to slow down. Pedalling and breathing with the city and all its entangled bodies in an attempt to counteract the impending sense of collapse.
If the body does not break a sweat, if it does not rush to its end destination
— what could possibly happen?
A man drove his bike carelessly, ceaselessly, into a flock of pigeons. He broke its neck. One of them. It did not die on impact.
The body stood there.
A man just killed a pigeon.
The body buried the pigeon.
The body dreamt that they devoured a chicken whole. Feathers, beak, claws.
The body has not eaten meat for fourteen years.
The body has not fucked anyone in four years.
A glutton in its essential element, and by all extensions.
Swallowing as an act of violence. Eggs would be the only acceptable form of devouring.
Every day there must be eggs for breakfast. One boiled barren egg sliding into the body and one painfully parched egg sliding out.
Every day fingers frantically flick over the compost to loosen pieces of sticky shell. The remains are crushed, reading as residue rather than food waste.
The pot, the water, the egg, the stove, the turning of the knob, the waiting, the checking, the waiting, the egg, the shell, the egg, the mouth. Each time, in the way that the body does it, in the way it has to be done.
Later, after the man killed the pigeon, after the burial, it started to cramp. The uterus shedding in clumps, not even bleeding properly, just releasing coagulated chunks of gore.
When younger, it was advised to not let the laptop rest on the belly to prevent the uterus from getting damaged by radiation.
On the street, a seagull feeds on the remains of a crushed chicken egg, the viscous yolk interlacing bird and asphalt.
Sunday evening the body throws up again. Vomit is splattered down the front of the suit.