It's Natural

Performance, 2024

This performance questions the idea of identity as a fixed essence and proposes a reflection on identity as a performative process, shaped by regulatory forces that precede the subject and structure the field of possibility before we are even born. It considers the body not as a natural given, but as the materialization of norms that regulate and constitute subjectivity.

The work emerged from my research with foam insulation and its symbolic and material properties. The rigidity of the spray, which expands and hardens rapidly after application, becomes a metaphor for the norms that mold and fix the body. Using a cast of my own body, I create a foam sculpture — a solidified, normative body — and confront the challenge of attempting to inhabit it.

The friction between my living body and the foam body constitutes the performance. This tension stages identity as a process of repetition, constraint, and resistance. The work is not only visual but also sonic: the sounds produced by pressure, contact, and strain become traces of the struggle to occupy a body already shaped by normative forces.