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Apartment 19
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Ahmed posits that emotions “work to align individuals with collectives—or bodily space with social space—through the intensity of their attachments” and “affect the very distinction between inside and outside.” This distinction, Ahmed argues, materializes at the skin’s surface, a site where bodily and social boundaries are negotiated. This first exploration began with thinking about the physicality of skin surface and the affective negotiations of a subject dermally aware. How does skin position bodies in space? What affective capacity does the distinction between inside and out inflict? With these questions in mind, the chroma-key green screen suit was taken as a material point of inquiry—a skin-tight spandex garment that not only mimics the physicality of a second skin but also engages the wearer’s full haptic sensory.
As a utilitarian object the chroma-key suit conspicuously contemplates the spatiality of a body and the presence of skin by sustaining the functions of a corporeal subject while erasing the visibility of its surface. To achieve such an effect, the spatiality of the subject must be minimized, where bodily space is compressed to mere two-dimensional skin surface. Bodily space can be seen as an affectively defined boundary. Physically shaped by proprioception—the body’s potentially range of space, metered by factors like wingspan, jump height, and flexibility—a spatial imaginary deeply connected to somatic feeling. Yet socially, it is negotiated by distinctions of private and public space—what volume of space is owned by a body, and what would be invasive to that ownership, as regulated by sociocultural values and norms.
The suit enforces full contact of the subject’s body with an external material, a haptic device that crafted a bi-directional acknowledgement of presence, where the wearer is not only aware of inhabiting a second skin but conscious of their own skin. This double consciousness made me see the disciplinary impact of being bound by a certain skin, a surface defined by the social that demarcates one subject from another, and a determination of who, how, and what the bounded subject can do. When I was reminded that this very skin is no longer visible, no longer negotiated as a surveilled exchange between subject and others, I felt a total alienation from who I was determined to be in the situation. A total contact with my skin, that which Ahmed theorizes as the “contact zone of impressions”, where sense perception and emotion takes place, gave me a total release from my socially defined self, that which is very much mediated by the impressions left by bodily others (2004: 30). I became acutely aware of the boundary that demarcated me from another, yet this very realization of physicality destabilized its established indisputability. The paradox of the physical is that it is simultaneously more tangible and more precarious—susceptible to pain and vulnerable to rupture. Perhaps this is why pain is such an all-encompassing sensation: a tear in the skin reminds us of the proximity of incompleteness.
Verisimilitude, 2024
Fabric scrap, fiberfill, chromakey suit, green screen