Touch like the touch of an other (2022)
20 performances for video | multi-channel installation
"It's been 4 weeks since I've been touched by another human being."
-Text Message received from a friend on April 23rd, 2020.
Touch like the touch of an other brings together 20 performances for camera shot over two months building up to lockdown in the fall of 2020. Covid19 has changed how we think about touch, its urgency, its comfort, and its ability to constitute us in the world. The touch of an other defines the boundaries of our bodies locating us in time and space. The touch of another centres us in our personhood. The other is that part of the world that exceeds us at our barriers; our collective recursive touch constitutes the world in singular plural. According to Jean Luc Nancy: "Being cannot be anything but being-with-one-another, circulating in the with and as the with of this singularly plural coexistence." [1]
Over 7 weeks in September and October, 2020, I cordoned off my livingroom as a makeshift studio and, with strict social distancing measures in place, invited one person, each on their own day, to enter and stand in front of a camera. "I want you to think of times when a touch has placed you firmly in the world. I want you to imagine those times in detail, go to them, and complete the touch on yourself." This video brings those people and their moments of "singular-imagined-togetherness" together. Presences weave in and out as ephemeral as the fleeting touch that constitutes each and everyone of us.
[1] Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2000. Being singular plural. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press. P.2.
