Something bright, then riffed
Soft Machines
MAC USP, Contemporãnea da Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil and VCA Artspace, Naarme Melbourne, October 2025
Thinking with Maggie Nelson’s poetry and the figure of the hole, this work emerged in response to a collaborative concept developed with Emerson Freire and Emily Yeonsoo Jung. The work was exhibited in Melbourne and São Paulo. Here are some of my notes during our development:
𝘚𝘰𝘮𝘦𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨 is an accumulative pronoun, its meaning dependent on context. It’s vague yet broadly understood, often used to gesture toward the indescribable. It’s a word for thresholds, holes, spillages, bodies, transmissions—all the in-between forms we’ve been drawn to. Something, in its vagueness mirrors our reluctance to be definitive in both our conversations and our working process. We have allowed space for ambiguity, for intervals of openness. The word holds both the indeterminate and the generative, capturing our way of working together.
𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘯 suggests sequence, continuance, and movement in time or space: something happened, then something else. It carries presence while also marking progression—a hinge between what has passed and what follows. For me it keeps the title moving, resisting stillness, and acknowledges that what we’re making unfolds in stages.
Finally, 𝘳𝘪𝘧𝘧𝘦𝘥. A riff is a repeated motif in music, often improvised. Our collaboration has been a kind of riffing—each of us responding, building, and layering upon Emerson’s initial proposal. A riff is vibratory, improvisational, and open-ended. As a word, riffed also plays with sound; it is a homophone of rift, a split or tear in continuity. This doubling feels right—our work is in the overlap between resonance and fracture, between continuity and rupture. The word acknowledges both the playful responsiveness of our process and the fractures, breaks, and thresholds that run through the ideas and materials we share.