When someone I loved told me he wanted to connect all the moles on my body, it seemed almost impossible; I have so many. I know the parts of my body pretty well and I could never be sure if I would not miss one because some are so small. It has always felt that to count them would come from the realm of the unknown or the infinite. Scientifically it would not be impossible, but it seems like a task of the imagination. As Bachelard says, "we cover the universe with drawings we have lived. These drawings need not be exact. They need only to be tonalized on the mode of our inner space."[1]

           

My moles have always been interesting to me as marks of something I don't know. In addition they are hereditary, my father had them. My father and I didn't look alike except in strange ways like the bone joints, my wrist, my feet or my many moles. That is not something that my lover knew, but he had spoken to a part inside of me. 

 

I asked a friend to draw a connection between all the moles on my back while another friend recorded it. I wanted her to draw on my back because that is the part of my body I cannot see and I cannot reach or touch. When I asked my friend to connect the moles on my back I didn't give her any pattern to follow, because the result of the constellation will always be my self. The video starts with my shoulder and a hand comes inside the frame with some blue powder on the index finger. She starts to connect the moles on my back. The finger is drawing and touching at the same time leaving an impression on my skin.

 

The title of this piece "I want you to do for me, what I cannot do for myself" indicates a passive and powerless position. In this video, I show a space of vulnerability (a distinctly feminine role) and embracing its possible negative associations. Irit Rogoff is a feminist that is engaged in a project of reassessment of these marginal, empirically unquatifible and non-quite-respectable emotions and activities and the attempt to theorize them. For as long as they remain outside theoretical activity, as long as they are not critically activated and mobilized, they remain in the form of essentialized, feminized 'human frailties'.[2] Rogoff's argument is not to empty or clear such emotions of their negative connotations, but to use them to question those master narratives that pretend to be so free and different from them. (For instance, when she uses gossip as a way of de-stabilizing of the coherence of 'gendered historical narratives').

 

In my video I am kneeling and offering my naked back to be touched in a gesture of submission and trust. David Hickey argues in his essay "Nothing Like the Son" how submission in the religion of Christ and submission in the 'religion of art' are erotically infected.[3]16 In this piece by giving myself in trust' I ennoble and control the 'beholder' in an act of 'suspended desire'. This 'suspension of desire' makes me think of Duchamp's brides in the Big Glass or in Etant Donne, but in this case the desire is not only of being seen, but also of being touched, blurring the limits between both. I can feel what I don't see and I just imagine. My skin becomes the paper in which the optic and haptic become inscribed, and I am the translator. This position of vulnerability is also a moment of transcendence; flesh and sky touching each other in real time. The finger moves slowly over the back and this makes it hard to watch. The distance from mole to mole and the time it takes in between is fully experienced, and on video it feels longer. As in the pilgrimage, time and space is not compressed but saturated. For example when I was doing the pilgrimage I was very aware of time and distance, every day had a full length. There were times that I would not want to walk any more, I would be tired or restless and my feet would hurt. The experience of doing 'The Way of Santiago' was very different from conceiving the idea just as my lover's idea of connecting the moles on my body was very different from the experience of doing it or watching the video.

 

 

 

[1]   Gaston Brachelard, The Poetics of space.

 

[2]   Irit Rogoff, "Rethinking a feminist practice of painting," Generations and Geographies in the Visual Arts, Ed. Griselda Pollock. (London: Routledge, 1996) 59.

 

 

[3]   Hickey Dave, "Nothing Like the Son," The Invisible Dragon: four essays on beauty. 28.