How it worked?
Upon receipt of the skins, the receiver spent a few days with them, wearing them, living with them, going about their lives in these skins. Eventually they engaged with the movement prompt I wrote, and audio invitation by Cy X.
Then, this person responded however they chose.
After sharing their response with me, this person will sent it to the next person participating in this project.
Mourning Ritual
Austin Lukondi
shiver the spine and remember, Britt’s offering back
Brittany Camacho
I can’t remember our last letter! Or my last letter to you at least, and I think that’s wild. It’s easiest for me to reflect on this project, to try to find the words from touch and form and formlessness like this, so I hope you don’t mind?
I think about you, our love and friendship, the skins you’ve made and the project that is becoming a lived being, in the archive. In the way we’ve archived together, with voice and laughing, with others bearing witness across time and screens, the way we carve out moments to speak and laugh and pause the world right where we are. I think about the time I had with these skins (from your hands, the threads, the fates on your fingers) like their own archive; a method of remembering and something that exists to be examined, read, lived in, shed, embodied.
I had a lot of “ideas” of what living in and with the skins would be like. A lot of the same taut tension of capital at the end of creation, of “I have to make something so it has to be something.” (which, how naive, isn’t everything something once it is?)
I’m writing this in bursts, just got up to make tea and move around. Living with the skins taught me again that I think when I move, that my muscles and tendons think, and that if you ask deep enough you might hear what was meant for you, or what you’ve been chasing, or the screaming you’ve been ignoring. I’m listening better now.
What I’m returning are less finished pieces, and more like ways of thinking. The way your exercise guided me to think and embody, to chase a feeling of joy or curiosity or say “hmm.” A way to laugh and think and wonder what might come of a subtle shift in my body or mushing my face in a scanner bed on your skins until it’s not a face anymore, or a hand, or anything. Meshing within the skins the way I felt I did when my bed held me and my voice took on your words.
The images are largely ordered in the order they came to exist. I started to archive and name the skins (my original thought was to digitally collage with them or write on them, comfort zones!!) in order to splice and play with them. But it felt strange to not have my own flesh or body visible or tangible. I kept thinking about that time you collaged a photo of me with a scene from some sort of prairie or plains, and how alive I felt to see myself as an image of your making. As me and you and something else I hadn’t dreamed of. So I thought I’d try that again, to be seen by you because I feel trusted in your embrace, and in your skins and the things you create and invite me into that have held me through so many lives and selves.
Ugliness isn’t something I make or lean into often. I’ve always run from the ugliness in me, the unsightly and things that I was begged to put away for others’ sake. But alone in my room, with a scanner and the skins and the hum of my body after doing your guided invitation, I felt I had the nerve to make without knowing what would come of it. The laughs I let out when I saw the images were gross and I loved them. They were full of the privacy and love of just doing without demand and going “what you see is what you get” and I felt so free and alive in being able to do that.
I tried all the pretty things, like journaling minutely and writing down scraps of poetry. I wanted to be presentable in this, but I found it so much more pleasure in just being myself. Hot, gross, weird, endlessly curious and unable to stop mushing myself against glass to perversely see what I could become and what was possible when I let go of the images I have of myself.
In the same vein is this letter, to your skins and you. Just what’s at the top of mind as I look at what I have for you, half named and half real, to do as you please. Enjoy, wander, take, and splice. There were days where I trusted you before I trusted myself, and my heart is yours for the ways you and your skins have empowered me to trust me as much as I trust you (y’all).
It’s so reductive, but I love you. I’ll love you always. Thanks for having me in this sweet coralys!
________________britt!
Paradise
Freeman James tattoos themself while cloaked in the skins
Patrick Bowes
Cyanotypes made with the skins, on his rooftop in Crown Heights