Backbone (Detanglement)

The work addresses the urgency of developing a collective and individual backbone in order to enact change. The work brings together fragile and resistant elements: frayed textile remnants are compressed and bound by bright plastic fasteners, while a segment of wire mesh evokes a skeletal or structural support system. The composition hovers between collapse and containment, suggesting a body that is in the process of either forming or failing.

The title can be understood as release or unbinding, but also as a moment of transition and birth: of bringing something into the world. In this sense, the work oscillates between constraint and emergence. What is tightly held together also signals the potential to come undone, to transform.

Its meaning shifts depending on its mode of presentation. When installed vertically, the work reads as a spine: an axis of stability, posture, and agency. Despite its provisional and fragile construction, it stands for the possibility of developing the necessary structure to resist, to hold, and to act. When presented horizontally, however, the same form evokes a worm-like existence: a body without verticality, without resistance, bound to the ground and to mere survival.