Specimens of a Body Without Humans

 

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I do not use sculpture as a substitute for flesh.

Here, flesh does not refer simply to biological tissue, but to a medium in which sensation resides, a condition through which the world can be touched, and a field that precedes the formation of the subject. In Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s terms, flesh (la chair) is the stratum of contact that existed before the differentiation of subject and object. I do not subscribe to this concept. What I address instead is the state that follows its collapse, a condition in which contact itself has ceased to function as a premise.

 

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There was a time when I assumed that the world could be accessed through flesh. The surface functioned as a boundary, sensation moved back and forth, and meaning was expected to emerge from this exchange. What I now confront, however, is the point at which this assumption no longer holds. Flesh no longer operates as a site of contact, boundaries have lost their capacity for passage, and meaning is suspended before it can be generated. My sculptures do not seek to explain this shift; they operate as devices that preserve the conditions that have already changed.

 

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As a thought experiment, one might imagine human consciousness being mapped onto some form of physical carrier, or onto a signal process capable of maintaining a stable state, and placed within a closed system that sustains itself. Questions of feasibility and ethics are set aside. In this scenario, the human subject is detached from the body and placed in an environment where life unfolds entirely within consciousness. Initially, one might reconstruct a life within the limits of individual imagination. Over time, however, consciousness would connect not only to other humans but to the cognitive activities of non-human and non-living entities—to vast informational processes—expanding its cognitive horizon without limit. The individual dissolves into the whole, and the whole no longer distinguishes the individual. What emerges here is not fulfilment, but a state that can only be described as emptiness.

 

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At the same time, the human body rapidly loses its meaning. It resembles a device left standing after its stock has run out: still operating, yet offering nothing. Without this mass of flesh, however, can one still claim that a human exists? At this point I recall the work of Girolamo Segato, who replaced organic human tissue with mineral structures, effectively petrifying the body. The forms produced through this process possess no consciousness, yet they remain human—or prior to that, they remain bodies. Having relinquished existence for the sake of meaning or purpose, they persist not as absence, but as an excessively precise form of emptiness.

 

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Although physical laws of conservation cannot be directly applied, consciousness and the body have long been understood as mutually dependent conditions. In the present space, a model of consciousness imagined as indefinitely enduring is placed alongside a model of the body rendered irreversibly fixed. Their relationship appears, at first glance, to be intact, yet in reality it serves only to sharpen the emptiness that lies between them. This exhibition does not interpret that emptiness; it preserves it. It exists as a form through which the indeterminacy and variability of the observer—including myself—are exposed, not along a single temporal axis, but as multiple, parallel states.

 

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The viewer is often placed, within the exhibition space, at a point where they are compelled to stop before understanding anything. A boundary seems to be present, yet no passage occurs; one does not move inward or outward. This condition is neither an entrance nor an exit, nor does it provide any impetus for transformation. It persists purely as experience. Within this exhibition, I refer to such a point as a closed threshold.

 

This exhibition constitutes an attempt to render as specimens the conditions of the body that remain after the human subject has been stripped away. These bodies are neither alive nor dead; they refuse growth and circulation, and remain only as residues accumulated over extended durations of time—bodies without humans. Sculpture here is not an object to be observed. Rather, through the act of observation itself, it exposes the bodily conditions of the observer and renders them as specimens. What remains is not the human as subject, but a body without humans that has merely responded to space.

 

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What I observe are organic structures that exist beyond flesh, having lost any point of reference, continuing to proliferate emptiness while containing nothing. My sculptures are another form of emptiness: moments of this movement fixed as specimens. They gather fragments and residues of various states, not as completed forms, but as configurations that remain suspended in their arrest.

 

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Emptiness, as used here, refers to a condition in which meaning, subjectivity, and purpose are no longer able to enter. It does not signify the absence of everything, but rather the impossibility of anything entering. Emptiness typically escapes into philosophy, emotion, or narrative. I pin it down, depriving it of mobility. To pin emptiness is to block its routes of escape through material conditions.

 

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The transformation of the boundary from a membrane into a shell is not the result of an operation on meaning. It occurs because the material no longer permits the passage of emptiness. This shell—that is, the closed region—is organic, without a theme, and retains emptiness within itself, remaining only as mass. There is no generation or hatching here; collapse alone remains as the sole possible transformation.

 

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Within this exhibition, a closed threshold refers to a threshold that was once predicated on passage but has lost its function, yet continues to persist as experience. When this condition becomes fixed over time, the closed threshold ceases to be a threshold and manifests instead as a closed region. What I present are cross-sections of this closed region: bodily conditions fixed and rendered as specimens.