“The work started from an exchange I had with an Chinese Indonesian artist, Fransisca Angela. Both of us had to undergo a medical exam to diagnose Tuberculosis when we arrived in the Netherlands. The exam consists of medical imagery: You hold a metal plate on your chest and have to hold your breath while an X-ray image is made of the lungs. In my work, I combined the medical image of my own body with the images that I had made under the microscope in collaboration with the immunologist of the Microbes Laboratory at Amsterdam UMC: we analyzed a drop of water from the basement of the Tropenmuseum, that dripped across the thick foundations of the museum. The exam showed that 95 living cultures were present in that water drop. In spite of all the efforts by the museum to seal its walls and shield the collections from the outside world, thousands of living organisms crossed the walls in microscopic quantities of water. I was interested in the porosity that becomes apparent in this process, by the fact that the aspiration of the museum to create a space for conservation that would effectively separate inside and outside is not operating.
Video shows an X-ray image of a body, that seems to be inhabited by moving organisms, while a voice over intermittently speaks in Indonesian, Korean and fragments of a poem in several languages flicker across the screen. The filmic collage combines my personal experience as I lived through my body, which became the object of medical examination, with the microscopic images of the microbes in the water drops at the museum. It considers the body as a geopolitical locus. As in territories operations of surveillance are conducted here to distinguish registered, allowed, legalized bodies, from those that are considered as a danger, or as stowaways, illegal entities – bodies crossing borders without permission.
I let the images of the microbes perform in my body – a gesture that created a very intimate contact with them – it allowed me to relate to them, bodily, to hold them (visually) in my body, not only to look at them, from a distance, through a microscope. The idea is that one body is connected to another body, and then yet to another one. By doing so I aim to go beyond the binary conception of non-human and human. This transmission between bodies reveals that bodies are related, and interdependent and are falsely conceived as isolated. These layered images of my body and the body of microbes can invert the misconception and give rise to the phantoms of the stigmatized kins. It is a translation of (un)captured bodies, (non)institutional bodies.[…]” ¹