Eija Loponen-Stephenson

There is a derelict demolition site at Baldwin and Spadina. In the pit are the remains of what might have been a home or a business: a hot water heater, tiled floors, exposed cinder block walls, rotting wood, and a stray shoe… sites such as these are often made in-visible in the urban environment by high, opaque fences. These fences are strategically deployed, it seems, as stand ins for the solidity of the structures that used to occupy the space. The demolished building represents the self-cannibalism of the urban scape. What once were kitchens counters, office windows and bathroom sinks are all folded into one another and turned into a new substance: rubble. In the rubble specific objects, previously separated by a local taxonomy of use, are finally allowed to mingle freely. We are not supposed to see this sort of object socialization because it allows us to understand that the impenetrable structures of the city are composed just as we are; they are composite bodies made of a sea of many smaller components (or actants) connected through symbiotic networks. When a composite entity is denatured through demolition it presents an often overlooked opportunity for new bodies to form while its components are raw.

This work is a proposition for a new body that might emerge from the rubble of the demolition site composed of both human and nonhuman components. A large sheet of heavy forest-green privacy netting often used to obscure construction sites is draped over the entire site and five human subjects. The draped netting acts as a skin producing a productive indeterminacy in which the bodies and surrounding objects are obscured and amalgamated. Ten long gloved sleeves extend from the surface of the sheet made of the same green net to be worn by the human subjects. The gloves are the only recognizably human facets of this new skin.