Holding a clear plexiglass incubator, I invite visitors to shuffle texts and watercolors housed inside. The typed texts, poetry and short biographical narratives moving across different social roles (from domestic to medical spaces) are in English and French, since the idea of translation—the movements between languages in space and time—is central to the action. The drawings accompanying the texts show improbable bodies created by imagining what transpires beneath the surface of the skin and which is ready to surface at any moment. I love bodies that spread out and overflow, bodies whose limbs and organs proliferate and unscrupulously appropriate those of other creatures from the animal or vegetable kingdoms. Through the metamorphosis of these hybrid beings, working from a feminist perspective, I strive to re-enchant the world that surrounds me, a world that all too often leaves me at a loss for words.

In order to see and read this extended book based on personal history, passers-by must do so in my presence by inserting both hands through the circular openings at the front of the box, slipping their fingers into domestic kitchen gloves. We are now intimately close. Facing each other, our hands through the transparent walls of the box seem to almost touch while the plastic walls and rubber gloves prevent any skin to skin contact. I am standing here as myself, both author and subject of these texts and images.

Discussing personal history, the body and embodiment in public spaces is a political gesture.

Passers-by must commit to this strange ephemeral relationship by stopping and taking the time to look, read and discuss what is there. Understanding the body as a social construction, I am interested in the influence of medicine and domestic space on the understanding of what constitutes us as human beings. Through the different social roles that we toy with and come to internalize, I am fascinated by the various ways in which one can inhabit, depict and talk about the body.