During my first studio visit, the director of the residency and I discuss grief.

I want my project to be about "unsticking" identity—about rendering identity precarious and not commercially cultivatable, and in that way free. I entered this project preoccupied by the transformation of one of Flusser's central artistic questions from "free from what" to "free for what."

As a part of my writing, especially writing about my mother, I often find myself looking back, retelling my versions of her stories as the necessary beginning of mine. They are the beginning, of course, biologically, cosmologically, spiritually, culturally. Even if they get deleted in a final draft. I function according to my programming. But I accuse her of using my sister and me to obliterate herself, and I find myself propping up this image of her in front of me, doing the very same thing.

She brought me here to be free-from; I will be free-for. This is what I intend to speak to the residency director about. But, because I bring it up without realizing, without making the connection, she and I end up talking about grief instead. How grief is also fungal: sticky, growing thickly in the dark before shooting up with enough force to move concrete. Grief and identity are linked, in all of the ways we know already in this violent and brutal modernity, and also some ways I am still figuring out.

connect

o o-i o-ii o-iii o-iii-i o-iii-ii o-iii-iii o-iii-iii-i o-iii-iii-ii o-iii-iii-iii o-iii-iii-iii-i D D-i D-ii D-iii D-iii-i D-iii-ii D-iii-iii D-iii-iii-i D-iii-iii-ii 0 0-i 0-ii 0-iii
substrate