Body Structured by Scars

There is nothing that causes me as intense cognitive dissonance as the image of a mechanical body in the act of fragmentation. The image is an attack on my core sense of coherence while exhilarating in its potential to describe what it feels like to have a physical body. I sense deterioration and loss of control of my body while observing the pseudo-death of the mechanical one, but it activates me. It is a distasteful catharsis that situates the norm of the body itself as a deformity, leading to antagonistic sympathy for the way the body exists.

What terrified me was not the fragmented form, but the hypothesized totality of the body. The idea of bodily wholeness felt more violent than its disintegration. Despite being segmented into muscle, fat, and cellular layers, the body is sealed beneath a single skin, creating the illusion of anatomical coherence. This so-called unity is no more than a fragile casing, like the shell of a grenade, barely containing internal pressure that threatens to scatter at any moment. Since then, I find myself compulsively imagining my body blasted apart, with fragments flying in all directions.

I am building a new body that passes through dissociative thinking structures. The process begins by cutting paper into small geometric forms, placing them onto black ground, and cutting them again to leave behind thin black outlines as traces of my gesture. As these outlines accumulate, they begin to store the repetition of fragmented contours. The repeated outlines resemble scars formed along the lingering traces left by a fragmented body. The traces self-organize, patterned along these scars, and spread like moss or lichen. The outer shell is fragmentary; the form is temporary; there can be no blueprint.

The complexity that arises here becomes a strategy for visual anesthesia. Fragmentation is rendered as excessive information, camouflaging the body’s material presence and inducing numbness. These devices are assembled and disassembled again to function as a body, suggesting another type of function. The body is rearranged along lines left by scars from different times and places, forming a structure that paradoxically reconstructs the moment of collapse.

The desire for fragmentation is always entangled with the deception of wholeness. That contradiction gives rise to a pain for an ideal body, one that never existed but was long believed to be complete. Neither scattered nor whole, I need a body stitched with scars. One that can endure the pain in my place.