The Body Before It Knows Where It Ends
Words by Alexandra Martinez
Common Skin Fantasy, installation views. Photographs by Rodrigo Gaya.
Courtesy of KDR.
I was twenty-five years old when I had my daughter, now almost nine. I pushed her out of my vagina in forty-nine minutes. When she emerged, the hours of pain vanished, replaced by feral clarity. "The most beautiful thing I've ever seen," I stated as fact as the nurse placed her on my bare chest. Her body was bloody, slick, vernix-covered, still carrying traces of my own inner flesh. Her skin met mine. Skin-to-skin contact triggers an oxytocin surge, regulating the newborn’s stress response and fostering maternal attachment. Experientially, it feels like an existential collapse of boundaries: when the newborn encounters the body that was, until moments before, its entire environment. That night, when I awoke to her sleeping in a bassinet beside my hospital bed, I felt as if a newly grown limb had been amputated. I picked her up and returned her to my chest. Her skin, to my skin.
This phantom-limb ache lies at the heart of “Common Skin Fantasy,” a two-person exhibition by Alicia Bilbao and Alejandra Moros at KDR in Miami. Psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu theorized the “common skin fantasy” as an infant’s unconscious belief that mother and child share a cutaneous envelope. Psychological development requires the painful dissolution of this illusion, allowing an independent self to emerge. But what of the mother, or creator, who must inhabit this same psychic connection? Independence demands weaning, a word carrying the grief of letting go and the violence of severance. What is necessary is not necessarily painless. Bilbao’s anime-like sculptures stage the body as a site of separation suspended between attachment and autonomy. Around them, Moros’ impossibly luminous surfaces draw the eye toward forms hovering between organic delicacy and biological threat. Their beauty does not neutralize violence; it makes it harder to escape. If Moros renders rupture seductive, Bilbao translates its pressure into corporeal evidence: wounds, excisions, severed attachments.
Working with an inventory that resembles the reliquary of a field surgeon — epoxy clay, human hair, beeswax, surgical steel, and animal bones — Bilbao constructs seemingly innocent figures embodying the terrifying duality of mothering. In “Orphaned Objecthood,” a weeping figure stands in the center of the room, hands pressed against her face. A circular excision on her back is sutured with a geometric lattice of black thread. White hair streams outward across the concrete until its dark ends grip an empty chair. The body’s grief extends beyond its flesh, attaching itself to an absence. In “Weaning,” a haggard figure stands upright bearing a decapitated form – the burden of nurturing a life. In “Executioner,” a Nokogiri saw slices through a fetal figure, suggesting that maternal unity must be severed for the child to become sovereign. Under the pressure of Moros’ paintings, these figures attempt to contain a violence that exceeds them. Moros’ hyperrealism makes intimacy equally threatening. Through ultra-thin glazes and feathery brushwork, she depicts stretched membranes, feathery talons, and tapered gator claws with disarming precision. In “50 Stitches,” a blood-red mucosal cavity is webbed with lines resembling surgical sutures and internal veins. In “El Estar o No Estar/Skin Song,” a tooth juts from a gum, unchecked growth swelling into a sickening, beautiful monstrosity. The closer we look, the less stable the boundary between beauty and violation becomes.
Together, the artists establish a “subtropical haptic gothic,” or “tropigoth,” rooted in South Florida’s humid, permeable environment, where boundaries soften and decay accelerates. In child-rearing as in art-making, the very touch that shapes a surface carries the capacity to mar it; we share the skin, but we can ruin it, too. Here, decay is a condition of transformation. What breaks down returns to the earth. If we remain with discomfort rather than rushing to repair or resolve it, what has been damaged can still nourish something new. The wound does not redeem itself. We must live long enough to discover what, if anything, can grow around it.