My Very Flesh Shall Resist Every Stone
Photo: eSeL
2021/2023, Photography | Installation
This work explores the relationship between corporeal boundaries and the built environment to question the place of queer bodies in urban space. My own body appears almost sculptural, tracing the lines, voids, and constraints of an unfinished structure. Its uneasy, modest posture underscores the tension between individual presence and the ideological and social forces embedded in architecture.
Anti- and pro-queer slogans are scrawled on my skin, mirroring the surrounding graffiti. This doubling collapses body and site, exposing how queerness is inscribed—violently and affirmatively—into both flesh and stone. Queer bodies, the work suggests, are not only spaces of physical vulnerability and social conflict but also active sites of lived experience and discursive resistance.
Installed on the forecourt of Vienna’s Museums-Quartier as five freestanding stelae (65 x 200 cm), the work relocates these marginal fragments to a monumental context. In dialogue with the city’s imperial facades, the piece insists on visibility, transforming private gesture into public confrontation.
