OUR SKINS ARE POROUS TOO (2019) Our Skins are Porous Too is an arttext-curatorial project developed with the online project space www.skelf.org.uk. An arttext itself, taking the form of an infinitely scrolling text, it also mutually curatorially frames pieces by eight other artists.
Our Skins are Porous Too is embedded below, however to fully explore the arttext and view the works within it, it is highly recommeded to CLICK HERE to visit it directly at www.skelf.org.uk.
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TEXT (starting point is arbitrary):
Our skins are porous too.
Moments of rupture. Of bleeding, of seeping.
Amidst the everyday banality of sweat.
Sweat.
Sweat.
Sweat.
Dripping.
Running in rivulets down a hunched back and lubricating the machine.
Our skins are porous too.
Holding us in.
A containing vessel within which we move in something we only encounter through it.
Epidermically veiled.
Except when we don't.
Or won't.
When we spill out across fragments of co-recollected nothingness.
Maybe everything.
A shared encounter.
Syringe me gently.
Stretched out across different bodies of different thought in differing relationship.
Cyborg bodies reaching out and colliding with the screen, a moment of connection.
Similarly taught, and young, and sensual to touch.
A caress.
Now faster.
An interface-to-facing into something more, a transference of oil and dirt and bacteria, microscopically crawling out from between the spiral lines of supposed biometric singularity.
Whose skin is this?
A collective trace of being. We lie atop it as it expands out in all directions, tense like a web. Reverberations passing across and accelerating into waves of unknown consequence.
At the ragged bleeding edge the hair follicles are visible.
Piercing down into the layers. A cross-sectional biological, geological map.
Bloody rips and flaps.
Hacked.
But the edge recedes to nothingness.
Not even a grain of a figment of imagination for anyone not present.
The underside is unknown.
The underside doesn't exist.
The underside of bloody entrails hanging off the collective corpus.
The soundless
drip
drip
drip
into the infinite void beyond.
Our skins are porous too.
Edge-boundary.
Skin on skin.
Sweat intermingles and coagulates from fold of flesh and limb and hollow into one another,
an entangled mesh of filament fibres.
Hairs lock together and apart in permanent momentary attraction and repulsion.
Lubricate by saliva.
Our skins are porous too.
The being slumps over the pin prick of becoming.
A minuscule speck of red.
Bodily matter hangs down around all sides.
It proceeds erratically, a flailing bundle of limbs seeking out traction.
Attraction. A random walk desperate for direction.
Perpetually proceeding, beginning to burrow.
Parasite.
Desperately trying to force a way through.
Nonconsciously unconscionably lusting for the unknown.
Forgotten.
It begs and weeps for another side, an inverse to the plane,
something to hold it all together.
A beyond or beneath or below or within.
A source.
An ending.
A comprehensible.
Somewhere out of which the blood and plasma weeps.
When the lash strikes.
And a shimmering cosmos of amorphous globular clouds of sweat and blood and piss and cum bursts forth.
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An accompanying podcast where Mark Beldan interviews me about the project can be listened to or downloaded here.
100 invitation-editions bearing the same text as the online site on a continuous möbius band were posted out:
