We’re all making worlds of oddkin, swirling in the same murky soup. At the end of the day, night is all there is. It swells with all the pleasures, guilts, pains, and imaginings of just being alive. Like the vampire squid, de Magalhaes’s nightlife pursues orientations that undo these very human dualisms. Nocturnal actors are aberrant disruptors who threaten diurnal order in its least visible hours. The rhythmic comforts of a swaying crib and a rocking chair coax us out at dawn, in at twilight.Ĭonvention teaches us that night is a space of monsters and villains.
The artist’s ceramic eggs harbor perpetual promise of this fantasy, gathered in quiet assemblages at edges and corners. To be ensconced in soft cocoons, to be all senses, all body. We want to ingest and be ingested, to feel eggs on our tongues, claws on our faces, pricks in our fingers, flames at our lips. Submission to this exuberance is an acknowledgment of feeling without knowing, a death wish of the sweetest, softest order. Human hierarchies and classificatory logics melt into entanglements in this metamorphic, multi-species churn, “an over-the-top bounty, a temptation to explore, an always too many,” in the words of anthropologist Anna Tsing. Everything has its place, but the places are wrought with effervescent tension, teeming with precarity. The artist’s layering of dye in translucent bleeds and thread in sharp, dense lines is a fine-tuned alchemy. All manner of biomorphic forms-including worms, winged insects, paws, breasts, and mouths-forge what Donna Haraway would call “generative oddkin,” making and unmaking themselves and each other and in ecologies of drops, tufts, swarms, and clusters. In her bed sheet fabric works, organisms and their environments become inextricably embroiled in a silky, elemental brine that both stages and subsumes. It’s in a similar kind of night, one heavy with time and turbid with life, where Lila de Magalhaes’s floral and faunal protagonists collide. Through eons of ecological flux, a thick, eternal night has not only provided its home, but its survival. Its ancient anatomical form has persisted virtually unchanged for 300 million years. While fictional vampires defy mortality, the Vampyrotheuthis is a living fossil.
What it does share with its namesake is an extraordinary relationship to time-one that exceeds human histories and life cycles. The vampire squid is accustomed to darkness but it doesn’t hunt, feeding only on bits of ocean detritus. Translated to “vampire squid from hell,” the Latin name suggests a Gothic fiend whose predatory tendencies blossom in the dark. The timestamp is only as accurate as the clock in the camera, and it may be completely wrong.About 3,000 feet below the surface of most tropical and subtropical oceans, a cephalopod called Vampyrotheuthis infernalis can be found gently swimming, unfurling its eight webbed arms. If the file has been modified from its original state, some details such as the timestamp may not fully reflect those of the original file.
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