A part of the eponymous exhibition.

In this performance, I set up construction scaffolding in a space previously used as a mall department store (note the black security camera bubble) and placed Bristol paper sprinkled with water-soluble powdered graphite beneath the scaffold. During the performance, I climbed the structure and spit from the platform while whispering portentions, worries, promises, dreams, intentions, and anxieties.

There were three iterations of this performance. In one of them, I used six sheets of paper, resulting in the Portal Drawings series. This iteration, however, was shot from three angles. When shown on a single monitor, black bars separate each frame, mirroring the geometric lines of the scaffolding. One camera angle shows the full height of the structure; the second, the paper; the third, my expelling mouth. My voice is audible and urgent, and I cry at times, but the words are unintelligible. I enter and exit the performance from the same point, creating a near-perfect loop in post-editing.

In this space, the future is down. Though in the United States we conceive of the future as ahead of us, horizontally (Lewis), here, I situate time as a vertical plane. The whispers are sent on the saliva, arrive and accumulate; explode. Marcel Griaule in Documents vol. 1 quipped, “Spit is soul in motion. We use it to […] deposit our will in an object” (381). Saliva travels on the pneuma (breath/spirit) and is impregnated by it. One could say we are a history of impacts and interventions, much as the paper amasses forceful contacts.