This text is teeming with microbes, a million can fit between one word and the next. It is impossible to calculate the exact amount of threats it will contain when read in large format. Invisible and indispensable, their existence guarantees heterogeneity. However, their suppression is a rule, as is the elimination of difference for the unity of a human body and, in its grotesque version, of a social body.
Imagine, while you read, that just one of these organisms grows until it becomes fully visible, that it occupies a space, that perhaps it moves, crawls, breathes. On a giant scale, a microbe is a monstrous creature, the threat that difference impresses on the aseptic surface of the room. But, as with birds held by the air that moves them, you too cannot inhabit the room without the monster now occupying it.
What can you do now? Clean, eliminate, neutralize, admit, welcome, endure, consent. Choose a verb. What can you do now? Imagine you feel fear, that you feel dirty, that you find yourself exposed, that the fear is provoked, that the dirt is infinite, that the air contains nothing but yourself and other identical bodies. Choose a verb to act upon this universe you inhabit without remedy and without alternatives. Make a decision based on hygienic criteria. Commit yourself: your health depends on the health of others.
This text is full of doubts and judgments. A million can fit between one word and the next, in the space for questions posed by this exhibition, saturated with microbes and disinfectant, but also with intimate, ethical, and political possibilities.
Intimacy, ethics, and politics, as particles of the hygienic, are the three realms "Asepsia" acts upon. The first of the series, The Mouth with Soap, refers to the linguistic dimension of the hygienic through the use of the towel as a paradigmatic object of private hygiene. Washing Hands, created from sponges impregnated with cleaning products reminiscent of sections of skin, highlights the conflictive relationship between the acting body and the agents that question it. Image Washing, the third of the series, amplifies the effects of the previous two and reveals the political dimension of the act of cleaning by showing the forms of microscopic organization that sustain and regulate the environment.
Stop reading, the dirt is not in the sign, but in the air. Wash your hands before entering, do not contaminate the space of this room. Wash your hands before leaving, remove any trace of the visit from your skin.
