Niche

Emma Jelinski

I am an anthropologist and museum educator. In my artistic, political, and academic practice, I engage with in-between states, processes of transformation, and the value of community and friendship.

Informed by my own late ADHD diagnosis, I have developed a research interest in crisis—its dynamics, ruptures, and theatrical dimensions. My work draws on artistic-research practices and strategies that center collective experience, alternative forms of knowledge, and shared modes of making.

Niche

I feel wrong. Unbelonging.
I am on holiday in a hotel with a pool filled with water from the Dead Sea. A therapeutic landscape. Injured skin, I drift among other psoriasis patients —bodies mapped in plaques, eyes inflamed, closed hearts. Someone says the skin is the mirror of the soul. Small, softened fragments—skin, soul—float through the salty water.

The days dissolve. Always in motion.
What are you always running from? From nothing. It’s all fine.

I move through years the same way: nights, cities, jobs, relationships. I leave. Keep leaving. Search, run. There is always a gap, an absence. A self that does not hold.

Why are you always running away? I am not, I am okay.

In crisis, he arrives—the demon—entering carefully, almost gently. I am not okay.
Perhaps everything must be exhausted: cracked open, inverted, overthought. Perhaps reality can be worn down until functioning fails—and something else remains. A niche.

My breakdown comes in spring.
At your deathbed I begin writing a crisis theatre script: Creatures of the Niche.

Beetles stagger about—fat, lost, burdened by shells too heavy and too many legs. They stumble, fail, spin in circles. Lying on their backs, they twitch, unable to turn over.

Larvae inhabit another layer: they follow predetermined paths in an underworld of endless molting and transformation, a continuous becoming without ever being butterflies. Only moths.

We drift like ghosts through the in-between world. Your wrinkled, thin skin has become translucent, and you tell stories—we don’t know whether they are true or spun in delirium. I sit at your sickbed and build a giant beetle head out of papier-mâché. You try to explain to me how to sew piping.

You ask if I’ve already been to the brain doctor.
You imagine I have a disease that can be treated, a condition that will be cured.
A happy ending, before you go.

You become smaller on the sofa. Transparent. Permeable.
As your body recedes, language recedes with it. Words lose coherence. Still, you insist on one thing: that I will be okay.

On a Sunday, in delirium, time loses its final contours.
We do not need reality. We need a niche.

I attach plush legs to a belt, antennae to a headband—assembling a body otherwise.
You sink deeper into delirium. I crawl across your carpet: ancient vomit stains embedded in the fabric, residues of former selves. You snore louder than the demon roars.

I write against the crisis, with it, inside it. Writing as a strategy of becoming.

A sick beetle attempts to climb a mountain. It falls, lands on its back in the valley of larvae. It looks around.

Beetle 1: I’ve lost myself. I’m afraid.
Larva 2: You look different from us. We are not afraid.
Moth 1: Now the world finally appears otherwise to you, lost beetle. Do you see? Do you feel? On your back, everything is inverted, misaligned. But this is a position, too. A way of being.

Welcome to the niche.