Miguel Enrique Lastra

Invasive Species

The Radical Body is inviolable. At times indecipherable as it is seldom stationary and as such it reconfigures the gaze that is placed on it. It is a marginalized body, a hybrid body, and simultaneously the body that passes you by on the day to day. A shell of malleable flesh. Via the ceramic process, I introduce corporeal forms in a state of anonymity; distorted legs, the ankle becoming a hand, discolored flesh. These headless and hollow bodies are transitory offering no conclusion, simply possibilities. Taking on the effort of representing the ‘othered’ body has led me to consider its immersion and atmosphere as well as its desire for transformation and augmentation by introducing the presence of nonhuman organisms as well as the machine. I use analog processes such as manual kiln firing and digital processes such as visual programming to accentuate the transformative properties of technologies on various bodies across time and space. Thus, the emphasis is placed on the radical body and its various modes of existence and its intersections with its environment in which case a free body is implied. One in which the body is given the possibility to satiate its necessity for form, immersion, equity, and coexistence.