blueprint for a third body
blueprints for a third body is a photographic and performative archive exploring forms of bodily deviation, resistance, and inscription in public and private space. The project engages with the politics of representation surrounding non-normative bodies - particularly trans, transitioning, or otherwise socially invisible ones- through site-specific image interventions across urban and domestic environments.

Conceived in New York and developed in close collaboration with Rouchka, a trans artist and friend, the project began with wheat-pasted portraits installed in the streets, bars, toilets, and bathrooms of the city. These acts of placement interrogate not only visibility, but proximity and consent: some images are encountered by chance in public space; others are faced in moments of intimacy. The work operates through layers of choice, trace, and exposure. Images then travelled and were paste in Berlin, Paris and London.

This archive of images is unified by a distinctive blue hue - both a reference to cyanotype as a feminist and proto-photographic practice, and as a symbolic threshold between the visible and the spectral. The color acts as a marker, a skin, and a shared surface of recognition across portraits.

The project addresses the tension between the highly coded nature of the Western body - binary, medicalized, assigned - and the potential of the body as a site of transformation, refusal, or escape. From historical practices of scarification, piercing, or gender reconfiguration in non-Western societies, to contemporary trans identities navigating recognition and risk, Blueprints for a Third Body traces how the body becomes not only subject, but language.

In resonance with thinkers such as Donna Haraway, Orlan, and Paul B. Preciado, the project does not seek to illustrate trans identity, but to gesture toward the multiplicity of ways bodies have always invented themselves. It resists documentation in favor of sedimentation: what remains on a wall, on a skin, or in memory.

2022
Archive photographies, wheatpaste