Durational performance and video essay 

Originally performed in 2019 at the Koumaria Residency in Sellasia, Greece, “Points of Contact" distills 45 minutes of running up and down through a densely forested hillside until a clear and accessible pathway was established. The work is meant to perform the co-constituting relations that generate materiality: how this union of contact simultaneously comprises and undermines the limits of my body and the bodily limits of the forest. The only incontestable marks are the third measure produced in the rupture—or rapture—of the first two bodies: the pathway through the forest and the scarring on my flesh. The video, shot by Michael Higgins, is accompanied by a poetic text which thinks through the implication of the experience at the time.

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There is an inherent conflict to existence. We at once seek to define a determinate identity that can only exist in relation to others who both affirm and deny us. We desperately want to exist in our own right and we desperately want to disappear into otherness. The question of mattering is thus one of simultaneous creation and dissolution. For Nietzsche it is the balance between the Apollonian and Dionysian, the construction of the determinate and its fragmentation into the indeterminate. When we stray off this fine line of self/other too far into the self the indeterminate reasserts itself in violence.