Abi Hodson

Peepholes and a motion responsive video reveal sites where limbs merge and layer with the materials that construct and reconstruct Montréal’s body. The construction site—a location where workers structurally transform a body of land and/or the matter that sits beneath it and/or above it—is layered with the human body, itself another site of change. An uneasy kinship emerges between two transforming bodies, where the systems of control, value, and normativity that intertwine in both human and city bodies converge and, sometimes, rupture. These points of overlap hold potential energy, but without direction, disruption risks repeating the very ideals it has the capacity to unsettle.

New construction materials and site footage are recontextualized through the visual language of a peep show, relocating these signifiers of change into an erotic register. Dislocating the construction site from its naturalized position of perpetually reproducing existing systems of control opens up space for a still unknown something-else to emerge through disturbance: a coalition of changing bodies and sites that push through the barriers of wall and window, inviting you to come closer.