The Fog Is Coming

Daisy Hildyard writes about the Second Body: ‘You are stuck in your body right here, but in a technical way you could be said to be in India and Iraq, you are in the sky causing storms, and you are in the sea herding whales towards the beach. You probably don’t feel your body in those places: it is as if you have two distinct bodies. You have an individual body in which you exist, eat, sleep and go about your day-to-day life. You also have a second body which has an impact on foreign countries and on whales.’

I am exploring the heaviness of the Second Body. What it means to be in the middle of everything, to be all over the place and to be complicit. 
From the outset, it seemed peculiar to me to be constantly on aeroplanes during my Art and Ecology studies, during which I have been scrutinising the global technologies of mapping and extracting our planetary body. The take-off into the upper atmosphere and the international repositioning of our bodies for the purpose of knowledge accumulation by artists and academics replicates what Donna Haraway calls the ‘god trick of seeing everything from nowhere’. The modern architecture of the airport aims to control bodies in motion through the denial of location. And as everyone knows, the aviation industry causes immense environmental damage through kerosene. 

In the second body, we carry the impact of everything we have caused on this planet. 

I carried a silicone doll through the terminals, and it was harder than I had expected. I was sweating and nervous. I still had back pain two weeks after the flight. The metaphor has become a heavy one. Sometimes I would like to overcome my body. To get rid of pain and of everything it is responsible for. And still, I want to believe in the body. It is our access to the world itself, and through it we are in contact and located. I like its porous boundary.  If we stopped trying to rise above its limits, we might lose the view from above, but we would sink deeper into being part of the world.





Thank you to

Elisa Zeisler

Kaija Knauer

Jannis Reinelt

Ilario Rascher












References

Daisy Hildyard


Donna Haraway













for filming the journey

for inspiring the voice-over text

for help preparing the flight

for dialogue














The Second Body. Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2017.


Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. Feminist Studies, vol. 14, no. 3, Autumn 1988, pp. 575-99.
The Journal of Art & Ecology published by MA Art & Ecology, Goldsmiths, University of London

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