Infinity Kisses

Infinity Kisses


About a year ago I met someone who changed my life. His name is Carlos, and he is a Siamese cat. Originally it was just supposed to be a temporary, house sitting arrangement, but the universe had other plans, and the temporary became permanent. Carlos has taught me a lot in a short period of time, and the one thing that never ceases to amaze and amuse (and sometimes bemuse) me is his concept of bodily sovereignty.

Erin often says that when we think of a body, how it is constituted in space-time, we tend to separate our bodies from entities we see as external to ourselves. Abstracting ourselves from the chair in which we sit at the moment we are asked what constitutes a body, forgetting we wear clothes, neglecting that we walk on surfaces, we think of our bodies as strictly human, as able to exist even temporarily in a conceptual vacuum, independently of the non-human. This is similar to the way in which many theories of the anthropocene seem to abstract the human from the environment/nature..

This is not so simple when you have a very affectionate cat. While I write this, my laptop is precariously perched on my crossed legs, far from secure, because sitting in its ideal location is a warm, cozy cat. My current couch-laptop-cat-pajama ecology is shifting and temporary. But having a cat as determined to cuddle as I do, I am constantly aware of the configurations of my body, the negotiations involved on the molecular and molar scale that are always already ongoing, whether or not we are aware of them.

For my final project, I considered doing a photography series that would explore the limits of the concept of bodily sovereignty as it relates to human-cat ecologies. For various reasons I chose not to, but I wanted to share the work that I continue to be deeply inspired by, Infinity Kisses by Carolee Schneeman.

The series was originally photos, but it has been rendered into a film, I believe by Schneeman herself, below. Enjoy!



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_m4wuJH4M8I