A. When breathing becomes work sets the scaffolding for a long term project about maintenance and repair. In this attempt to understand how the immune system works as the elementary mechanism for survival, the body and its environment is examined as the terrain: such that rhythms of heat and labor; oxygen and rest distribute life itself from the molecular to the climatic.
B. A triad of interconnected elements form the base of the scaffolding: terrain - landscape - body. These elements characterize the ground where life is cultivated and kept in place. A second triad corresponds as the atmosphere that illustrates movement, temporality, and
interconnectedness: diagram - scaffolding - labor. Such diagrammatics make visible how the experience of everyday life is being dismantled and re-assembled in rhythms of maintenance and repair.
C. But what happens when control is disguised as maintenance work or care? When an attempt to take a rest becomes a task to be performed. On a molecular and symbolic level, what happens when the only defense mechanism of a body confuses itself as a foreign invader and attacks itself? Isn’t this symptomatic of the deeper crisis where modern needs are produced and maintained at the expense of cheap labor and the lives of indigenous peoples and environmental defenders? How did such terrains become obsessed with its own destruction? Is this how we want to evolve?
D. Installed in two iterations at ALT Philippines Special Projects and Art Basel Hong Kong Kabinett Sector, the work presents the diagram as the scaffolding that makes up the structures of daily life. It does so by building from: images of a body scan; an ancestral family tree as the nervous system (Kabinett Sector); sensing and painting the movements of plants and the body; and research on privately-owned landscapes.
