For and with Nancy.

Lara-Marie

Lara-Marie (she/her) studies Applied Theatre Sciences in Gießen, Germany. Her texts and performance works situate the body within the world—as something at once exposed and intimate, fragmented and expanding. Writing from within a mixed-abled body, she traces the thresholds where inside and outside blur, where sensation becomes relation. Her work circles the vulnerability of the feminine body and reveals the fractures where systems leave no space, making visible what is otherwise concealed, turned away, or held at the margins.

For and with Nancy.

The body falls apart. It unravels itself ceaselessly into all its substances, its masses, its fragments. It destroys itself, while at once expanding, always something outstretched. The body is infinite in its expansion, an eternity of the body that manifests as the feeling of the soul. To be—as body. As its intimacy.

The body, like the soul, reveals itself only through its outward relation to the world. Because I think of it—the body—and through it, I constitute it as something exposed, as a flaying. I cannot think it when I am it; I must look upon it from outside if I am to define it, if I am to find its forms and bring its endings to an end. The body does not feel where its veins are, where its entrails thicken, where its fibers fray. The body is. And in feeling the body, I am outside the body. I must be outside. The body is felt by me.

The moment I no longer feel my organs, I am intimate with my body, I am healthy, I am it. I open the body lightly, I touch myself, I do not destroy it. I show myself, I undress, I am exposed through my body—only it exposes me. I am in the body with my hands, gently opening the layers and clumps that lie within me, and my body is outside and inside, and I am outside and inside at once. Fiber—out—of—itself—woven.

I touch my body only from the outside, through my skin. I hold it in my hands, the one I believe it to be. I feel it only from the outside. Through its own outside, and thus also through it. I am skin and feel through the skin and imagine that what I (the body?) hold and feel truly is that (the body). I cannot be certain.

My visual body is fragmented, and to me—as to all others—only the outside is visible. Less. Far less. My body is a surface turned toward the world. I see my feet, my arms, my belly. I see only parts, only shards of this dismembered, exposed body. My back, my moon-side, and my face remain closed to me. Here too it seems that the expression of my soul can only be seen through the outside (here, the world). I feel myself from within through my outside. Am I inside or outside when I am in pain? Where does my pain reside? Does it, like the body, lie within—in the hidden, the turned-away, the sealed, the extended? Can I turn away from the pain that lies within and is viewed from outside? Can pain expand so far that inside and outside overflow into one another?

In-between-space pain. The pain expands, spills beyond the borders of the body and creates a rupture between interiority and exteriority. This threshold-space is the liminal place where body and world, self and other, are interwoven. The pain that mixes these two irretrievably separated forces—that is the true pain. It is the pain that dissolves the clear distinction between inside and outside and reveals the inherent vulnerability of the body. This is the pain of finitude, the pain of mere existence.