The Tetherings series positions medical waste as a site of material investigation. Conjuring queer crip elder Leah Lakshmi Piepzna Samarasinha’s notion of the “cosmology of mess,” The Tetherings expose the brutality of interconnected systems using methods of burning, tangling, and grafting, exploring the connection between discard, debilitation, and excess. As relics of heat alchemy, the medical tubing deviates into a fleshly corroded form. The Tetherings lurk within registers of toxicity, cripping time and sensation as they curl away from sterility and curative imaginaries. Through material and formal specificity of maimed medical tubing, the series suggests the impossibility of figurative representation of disabled bodies. Instead, the use of abstraction proposes a focus towards the violent systems of coercive power that debilitate and disable. This is not a body suspended, but ricochet between conditions of support and malfunction, fusion, and breakdown.

Used and new medical tubing, Thera-Band rubber resistance band (medium), Thera-Band rubber resistance band (extra thin), steel L-hook anchor, stainless steel wire cable, Thera-Band latex resistance tubing

2022-ongoing

Photographic Documentation by Neighboring States and Perri Cohl