Spoken word

The performance was accompanied by the spoken-word poem written and read by me live at the start of the performance. The poem is directly influenced by the Field trip I did on 01/04/2025 in Seltún. The poem was spoken in a range of voices from a muttered, threatening whisper and deep voice to a seductive child-like voice.

i grew here like an extracted tooth 

in your soft flesh

solid is my promise

to haunt you

in the fractured bones

in the grinding of the teeth

in the slow passing time

i live in the entropy of your warm body

that gives way to otherness

i welcome you in the steaming rot

of our co-becoming that will destroy you

and me 

and eternal 

return

 “We are all in this together, humans and non-humans, materially and dynamically.”

—Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), 49.

Braidotti frames the posthuman body as a dynamic assemblage. The geothermal body is a posthuman body, which is leaky, porous, and not sovereign or purely individual. We too dissolve in steam, we recombine in mineral water. The geothermal is not outside the human but coursing through us. Both are part of a single thermodynamic field.

As another performance within the series, this work opens and activates a performative space that challenges the conventional separation between sculptural and performative practices. Conceived not as a static installation but as a dynamic field of encounter, the space is initiated through a performance that focuses on humidity, warmth, and the mouth as sites of porous relationality.

Drawing a parallel between the moist interior of the human mouth and the geothermal terrains of Iceland, I came to sense the mouth as an oscillating threshold, which is intimate yet public, interior yet exposed, and whose atmospheric and sensorial qualities resonate with the thermal and mineral conditions of the geothermal sites I worked with. 

The gestures that shape this performance arise from embodied experiences in the field. While extracting geothermal minerals from clay-rich ground, a subtle correspondence became perceptible: the earth’s soft yet tenacious resistance recalled, with an almost unsettling closeness, the sensation of yielding gum tissue. This relational parallel emerged gradually, not just as a metaphor but also as something felt and material. From this encounter arose the opening line of the spoken-word poem: “I grew here like an extracted tooth, in your soft flesh.”  The performance thus explores the mouth not only as a site of ingestion and expression but also as a place where extraction, intimacy, and ecological entanglement converge.

The performance begins with the expulsion of several small stones that resembled teeth and fell from my mouth together with threads of saliva, a gesture that gives way to a spoken-word poem in which the voice operates as another material element: humid, warm, resonant, and shaped by my engagement with the site.

The ecofeminist dimension of the work unfolds through this interplay between body and land, each marked by processes of yielding, resistance, and vulnerability. By foregrounding the mouth as an erotic, porous, and materially active site, the performance gestures toward the intertwined capacities of bodies and landscapes to affect and be affected. Rather than positioning the Earth as a passive resource, the work proposes a sensuous and reciprocal field of relation in which organic and geological materialities are bound by shared intimacies and pressures.

Following the performance, where the geothermal minerals were hung on hooks resembling meat hooks, the space reveals suspended geothermal minerals slowly swirling in the air. During the performance, under each mineral is revealed a speculative score. After the performance, the audience is invited to engage with these scores, inviting them into the performative field and thus encouraging their own embodied engagements with the geological materialities. In this way, the performance does not simply precede the installation but initiates and opens it, similarly to a singing bowl that rings in the class or a meditation sitting; it sets a tone, which is a vibrational space, and implies movement and rhythm. Within this space, the choreography extends beyond my body and is transmitted and continues through the encounters of those who choose to participate.