AR TICULATIONS

AR TICULATIONS is a project in two parts: one part is a poem, and the other is the same poem drawn as bone-like formations. The work's dis/location mirrors the etymology of its title: ‘articulation’ relates to ‘joint’ and ‘joining’ — particularly in relation to the setting of bones, and, in butchery, the division of meat into joints. Both iterations of the project address a broad fragmentation of matter and subjectivity to explore what it means to have, as well as to be a body: to possess and manifest; singularly and collectively.

By reimagining connections through which letters and words are joined in sequence, AR TICULATIONS makes alternative structures of arrangement visible. Variations in sense and sense-making instead rely on momentum — just as bone, despite its rigidity, is malleable and always in flux. As a text without conjunctions, an ossified lexicon with no fascia or cartilage, drawings connect via ball and socket, condyloid, or hinge joints; others by way of unnamed joints, overlapping, or becoming hybrid — where a single bone forms two or three letters. Unlike conventional syntax and its governing logics, parts here coexist without conforming to a set of unifying principles. That is, they allow for difference: of all the drawings (comprising 766 characters), no two are the same.

A short excerpt from an earlier version of the drawings appears in Intertitles: An anthology at the intersection of writing & visual art, published by Prototype in 2021.