X-hale
(2023)

Video shows an X-ray image of an immigrant body during a Tuberculosis (TB) test that seems to be inhabited by moving organisms, while a voiceover intermittently speaks in fragments of a poem in several languages flicker across the screen. The filmic collage combines the my personal experience as i lived through my body, which became the object of medical examination when i arrived Europe, with the microscopic images collected at the Ethnography 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. Microorganisms that seeped into the museum from outside are superimposed onto the my body, forming a composite body in which the state’s border regime and the colonial museum’s systems of collection and classification converge. Destabilised images unsettle the institutional orders that seek to identify bodies and forms of life and assign them to fixed categories.