October 1 - 14, 2025
B10: Pacific Northwest College of Art
Portland, Oregon
“It's always the same story: go out in order to come back in, leave in order to arrive, begin in order to finish, and vice versa. I had gone out, left, begun, but everything else was in his power, except the points of my limbs and of my desires, which limbs and desires were at that time inert. This story has already been told, I've already lost all that, and I've already forgotten, and it's the memory of that forgetting that reassures me. I know it all in advance: the only part that eludes me is the ending. Looked at from the other side, from the outside, the ending could be taken for the beginning: this waiting has already taken up time, has already come to an end.”
The third body is what is formed when two people forge a deep relation. Like the third space, the third wave, the third body redefines what it means to be a body. The body in this context is not merely flesh, it is a site of language. At times the body is earth, ash, taken up by the wind. It is a metaphor. And when the lover leaves, what is left? The pain of knowing, of having had, now of longing. This is the beginning. The body soon reconstitutes itself as one, stands on two legs, learns to love again.
Inspired by the novel, the Third Body by Hélène Cixous, I Write with the Body explores permeable boundaries between self/other and spaces in-between. In the text, Cixous reconsiders binary structures as thresholds, not as opposites, but fluid and unstable. Embracing desire and ambiguity without categories. Endings and beginnings are indistinguishable depending on perspective. Waiting, which seems like a suspension, has already transformed into completion just by existing in time. The cyclical nature of experience is upon us, beginnings and endings are folding into each other. Memory and forgetting blur what has truly happened. “She” was trapped in a loop where everything had “already happened,” except the ending, which remains elusive. Forgetting becomes comforting and the tension that resides there is temporary. These interstitials form the body as text, the gaze as wound, and touch as intimacy becoming multiplicity.
Using large- format photography and moving image, this study creates a Cixousian third: a visual presence that is not one, not two, but something unspeakably in-between.
I Write with the Body is blur, as a gesture caught in transition, a double exposure, a shadow between faces, or the ghost of a self remembered. Through layered female subjectivity that emerges through a physical and psychoanalytic lens, this work is psychedelic in nature. The text does not explain the visual and in its whole, rejects that images should be translated into words and words into literal images. Neither medium resolves the other. Instead, they create a productive disorientation, in which the viewer may confront the porous gaps between meaning, image, and language. Here, the body is a metaphorical space between binaries: man/woman, self/other, mind/body. Here, the body-third, doubled and undone, becomes both wound and threshold, both ending and beginning.
Moving Image:
The Incantation of Gradiva
Operating as a mythopoeic film, the sacrificial script is imposed upon the feminine. Drawing on the spirit of Hélène Cixous’s fascination with Wilhelm Jensen’s Pompeian fantasy novel, Gradiva, as well as the essay by Sigmund Frued, Delusion and Dream in Jensen’s Gradiva, these moving images examine theological narratives that have historically conscripted women into cycles of self-erasure. The camera acts as the technology of invocation / an exorcism of the “proper” that privileges the masculine while the feminine is resisting her enclosure. The Gradiva in this film is ungrounded, un-tethered, pulsing with devotion, vitality, and multiplicity. And as in Jensen’s novel, she is excavated from the proper and carried into non-linear time.
“The body is a medium through which language is generated: a transmission, an inscription, and a renewal is made.” - Hélène Cixous