This new relationship between my body and the foam bodies led me to fabricate new molds for applying foam and to use them more as wearable prosthetics that allowed me to enter and exit them with fluidity. As I began to film and watch this new stage of experimentation, I noticed that the reflection of my gestures on the floor was generating another layer of image. This discovery prompted me to experiment with the concept of justaposed layers in different temporalities within video. I began to perform for the camera, exploring interactions between my body and the foam bodies as extensions of myself. Through this process, the accumulation of bodies expanded into layers of image, transforming the documentation into a new choreographic space. From the conventional definition, a prosthesis is understood as an artificial device that replaces a lost part of the body, seeking to restore function, appearance, and quality of life. However, in Rebecca Horn’s work, and in my own experiments with foam bodies, the prosthesis becomes a poetic and performative device. Rather than giving back to the body what has been lost, these prostheses invent extensions that never existed, producing gestures, presences, and relations that destabilize the “natural” body.
In Art Monsters, Lauren Elkin argues that the “art monster” functions as a strategy of disruption — a way to crack normative boundaries of form, identity, and aesthetics through deliberate excess, fragmentation, and tactile transgression.12 I ask myself how drag queen performances and Elkin’s concept might intersect, in the sense of bodies that, as Judith Butler reminds us, “do gender wrong”, and how my experiments with foam bodies resonate with this impulse by destabilizing coherence. Through this dialogue, my wearable foam sculptures become monstrous not through parody and opposition, as in It’s Natural, but through the exercise of a body that invents prosthetic extensions, accumulates layers of image, and insists on its own incompleteness as a site of transformation.
The body became a continuous field of experimentation, where sculpture ceased to be a static object and was instead lived as a bodily extension—a wearable sculpture, a prosthesis that displaced gestures and perceptions. By treating the foam as a prolongation of my body, I opened a path toward new forms of performative presence, in which sculpture and body were no longer in opposition but merged into a hybrid organism, at once artificial and organic.
This shift marked an important transformation: the foam body, which at first seemed rigid and imposed, gained another meaning when I began to use it differently. Moving away from struggle and friction, I started to engage with the material in a more choreographed and prosthetic way. What had begun as a study of static poses evolved into a practice of wearable experimentation, where each configuration of body and foam produced new possibilities of gesture and perception.
In this sense, my process resonates with Rebecca Horn’s prosthetic extensions, which transform the body into a site of machinic and anarchic potential, and with Hélio Oiticica’s parangolés, where the wearable functions as both sculpture and movement generator. Through this dialogue, my experiments suggest that wearable sculpture operates not only as an accessory to the body but as a partner in performance—an artifact that expands, destabilizes, and re-signifies the body itself.
The documentation of these experiments through video and photography was not a secondary record but part of the research itself: a way of layering new prosthetic dimensions digitally, extending the wearable into hybrid choreographies beyond the live moment. In this recursive process of wearing, moving, and re-inscribing, the foam prostheses became tools for questioning the stability of the body and for imagining new performative presences.
What began as an experiment with foam’s resistance evolved into prosthetic choreographies that unsettled the notion of a “natural” body. The performances revealed identity not as essence but as repetition, vulnerable to fracture and open to reinvention. In this process, constraint became a site of invention, prosthetics became monstrous extensions, and documentation transformed into choreographic layering. Rather than offering closure, the work affirms that performance-based research is an unfinished practice—one that continues to imagine bodies otherwise, in excess of normative frames.
After presenting It’s Natural, I began to wonder how I could relate to the foam body in ways other than wearing it. I found a productive reference in Jack Halberstam’s essay Rebecca Horn: Of Unicorns and Anarchy, which examines Horn’s work with prosthetic body extensions since the 1970s. Horn’s practice challenges traditional ideas of femininity, technology, and the body, positioning the female body not as natural or passive but as a site of machinic, performative, and anarchic experimentation. Halberstam argues that, in contrast to artists such as Marina Abramović and Yoko Ono, who expose social violence enacted on the body, Horn invents prostheses that expand capacities, strength, and creativity. In this way, the body is not only vulnerable but also becomes powerful.10
From this reflection, I began to question how I could use the foam bodies differently, understanding and experimenting with the concept of a body made through extensions, mediated gestures, and collaboration with the foam as an artifact to generate poetic compositions in constant movement. This allowed me to engage with the foam bodies through a different relationship: not through struggle and friction, but with greater fluidity in my movements, layering my body with the other foam bodies I created.
