A one-on-one participatory performance investigating the violence of societal categorization and the physical weight of institutional language.

Set within an abandoned hospital, the work transformed a confined, two-square-meter room into a clinical triage unit. Before entering, participants made a silent choice regarding physical contact, wearing a green or red sticker to establish a silent boundary.

Once inside the isolated space participants were guided to tune into their physical sensations and identify which specific part of their body felt the strongest reaction or the heaviest burden. Only then were they asked what word arose from that physical coordinate. This word was written on medical tape and affixed directly to that spot on their body. Through deliberate physical contact and shared gravity, I leaned into them, using my own skeletal structure to temporarily bear the brunt of that invisible, systemic load.

Conceived initially as a rigid, anti-therapeutic procedure, the performance ultimately revealed a profound collision between the premeditated coldness of a bureaucratic system and the inherent warmth and awkwardness of human touch. The encounter concluded with participants ripping the tape from their bodies and archiving it onto a wall of blank medical forms.

What remained was a growing, visual archive of a city’s collective exhaustion—a fragile testament to the shared, trembling memory of bodies holding their ground against the gravity of the outside world.

Photo by Jennifer B