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.”
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 margins. Waiting, which seems like a suspension, has already transformed into completion just by existing in time. Embracing desire and ambiguity, 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 analog processes as intimacy becoming multiplicity.
Using large- format film photography and moving image, this study creates a visual presence that is unspeakably in-between.
I Write with the Body is the gesture caught in transition, the double exposure, a shadow between faces, or the ghost of a self remembered. Through layered female portrature and subjectivity, emerges a physical and psychoanalytic lens, psychedelic in nature. Text does not explain the visual and in its exhibiton, 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 gaps between meaning, image, and language. The body being between binaries: man/woman, self/other, mind/body. Here, the body-third, doubled and undone, becomes a wound and a threshold, both an ending and beginning.
The third body is what is formed when two people forge a deep relation. Like the third space or the third wave, the third body redefines what it means to be a body. The body in this context is a site of language or 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 wound 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.
Moving Image:
The Incantation of Gradiva
Operating as a mythopoeic reimagining, the film liberates Gradiva from the sacrificial script historically imposed upon the feminine. Drawing on the spirit of Hélène Cixous’s fascination with Wilhelm Jensen’s, Gradiva and Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic reading of the novella in Delusion and Dream in Jensen’s Gradiva, the moving images suspend Gradiva in nonlinear time; between the suggestion of movement and the fixity of stone. As Hanold projects his fantasies onto her, her image becomes detached from her own subjectivity and made to serve his desires. Seen through a feminist theological lens, this idealization evokes traditions that sanctify feminine self-abnegation, transforming feminine submission and emotional labor into virtues through which masculine subjectivity is restored.
“The body is a medium through which language is generated: a transmission, an inscription, and a renewal is made.” - Hélène Cixous