Out of Bone is a five-part embodied attempt at crafting a counter-institution, one that emerges from the margins—from spaces where bodies historically rendered invisible or excluded from formal institutions such as museums, archives, and libraries have continued to live, labour, remember, and make meaning through what Tina Campt calls “everyday survival practices.”
In conversation with the work Fifty Hair Bones and Sun Disk (To the students of the Aachener Werkkunstschule), 1971 by the sculptor Nancy Graves, and drawing from the materiality and textures of domestic and communal spaces—kitchens darkened by soot, fingers dragging through the ground, waterways that guide our navigation, bones that clatter when stories are silenced—this work proposes a different kind of institution: one that holds space for the untranslatable, the interrupted, the unsayable… an institution made of breath and bone, motion and mark, refusal and return.
Through mark-making, activations, call, movement, and voice, Out of Bone refuses to replicate dominant institutional forms. Instead, it seeks to remember and reanimate other ways of holding and transmitting knowledge—ways that (re)produce life and community through ancestral, cyclical, collective, and living practices.
A Performance
2025