IN SPITE OF EVERYTHING

2023

Video Installation: 2x videos, felt, graffiti
Filmed in collaboration with Marta Hryniuk

In Spite of Everything investigates gestures of refusal through the act of spitting. The project is inspired by a scene in Diane Bonder’s video work Physics of Love (1998), in which a photograph of the artist’s mother is spat upon by the artist. This moment is re-enacted in the project as a meditation on bodily memory, unresolved relationships, and the disruption of the familiar.

Spit becomes both subject and material: a paradoxical fluid that signifies affection and aggression, purity and pollution, ties and resistance. It lives in the mouth, mingles with speech, and exits the body with a sound that punctuates contempt. Traditionally relegated to the vulgar, saliva is one of the bodily fluids—alongside sweat, tears, and menstrual blood—that society demands must be contained. Through spitting, the work reflects on uncomfortable emotional states that escape or exceed language.

One video captures the re-enactment of the scene while the video Notes on Spit (18 min.) is a meditation on its meaning, by weaving personal biography with a broader historical and ecological lexicon. It traces patriarchal anxieties over leaky, uncontrollable bodily fluids to historical attempts to dominate a capricious nature. Confronting these lineages of bodily discipline, the work positions spit as a visceral, cross-species gesture of exorcism, boundary-marking, and protection.

Special thanks to: Marta Hryniuk, Sophie Bates, Nick Thomas, WET film, Jake Caleb, Hedvig Koertz, and Roni Zaftig.

Exhibition documentation: Jake Caleb & Ari David.

Exhibited at an other world, Rotterdam, Netherlands, 2023.