skin ————– kin ——— kinetic
_________a becoming_________
My initial priority, when I started externalising my gender troubles, was my skin. I yearned to transform it, to shift its tone and texture into the feminine spectrum. Before I even considered my body shape, it was my skin that mattered.
skin collects: dust / pollution particles / stares
(bare) skin offends / attracts
Skin comes in a spectrum of tones and colours: not just two.
skin reflects / rejects / absorbs
thick skin —————— thin skin
_________ a metaphor? ________
“Your skin will become a bit drier and thinner,” they warned.[1]
“More transparent” said someone else, although they could not fully explain.
“More elusive?” I thought.
As for myself, I noticed that I get cuts more easily than before.
I haven’t gotten used to this yet, and from an ideological perspective, I find it hard to come to terms with.
Does oestrogen make women more fragile, more vulnerable? This hormone alone? Could it be that simple?
I think of all the women who are tough: most of them.
I think of all the manual labour women have historically been burdened with:
the women of my family… my grandmother… my mother… working in the fields, factories, hotels, and homes… enduring freezing cold and scorching hot weather…
How have they coped with such thin skin?
“When you touch things, they may ‘feel different’.”[2]
A new superpower or a new vulnerability?
The haptic quality of the sense of touch changes one’s relationship with the world:
a minefield of gender essentialism.
I ask:
how to reach an embodied quality of knowledge otherwise?
I answer:
do not focus on the knowledge from a point of difference.
———— skin breathes ————
skin is the liminal land
between what is in and what is out
skin is the political border of the self [3]
the point where the boundaries of personal sovereignty are set
_______another minefield_______
The European continental privilege erects an unnatural political border between my skin and the skins on the southern side of the Mediterranean.
A privilege of land over water, shattering the great ritual circle that the Mediterranean Sea has been for millennia.
A circle where cultures, trade, and ideas once flowed freely; where colonisation, territorial wars, and violence intertwined; where migration, displacement, and settlement were constant rhythms; where spiritualities, religions, and ecologies moved across land and water in all directions.
The political division of skin “colours” served the insatiable greed of a newly-born economic system, intertwined with ancient imperial practices of hierarchical class and gender organisation, and driven by an endless thirst for territorial expansion. How much longer will these systems keep on reigning?
The reclaiming of skin division by social justice and liberation movements empowers the struggle against the historic and contemporary discrimination and racism embedded in Humanism.
Do we want to remain within this framework? Or do we seek a way out?
I go back to liminality
I go back to the land
_________the fluidity_________
——- the constant change ——-
Every land has its own affinities.
I was born in this land during a relatively peaceful time. My privilege is temporal.
This land has been colonised repeatedly by different tribes, empires, and nations.
At times, its population was almost entirely wiped out and replaced by different peoples.
Who am I? The product of those processes.
I have olive skin, I am told: confusing
my skin colour is neither grey-green (upper side of olive leaves)
nor silver-green (underside)
It fits well though as a bioregional categorisation.[4]
I imagine other categories: Fig skin.[5] Apple skin. Oak skin. Cocoa skin. Aloe skin.
I do not have even a single tiny tattoo.
This says a lot about my relationship with my skin.
I do have some marks, though.
old cuts ————————– accidental
burns —————————- intentional
putting out cigarettes on my arms:
partly masculine-conditioned bravado
partly pain threshold-testing
partly teenage boredom
partly placing a reference point on an ambiguous skinland
borderline self-harm
skin ————– feels ——— the heat
skin —————————- burns
_________ a landmark _________
I used to say:
“I like the skin so much
– aesthetically, sensually and erotically –
that I do not wish
to crack it,
open it,
cut it,
pierce it,
reveal what lies beneath.
Not my own skin, nor anyone else’s.”
“In the context of performance art, I am not interested in blood. I leave that portal to others.[6] I choose the superficiality of unbroken skin.”
skin —————————- wounds
skin —————————- heals
_________ a cycle _________
The slightest cut on my skin triggers a disproportional eruption of anger. This container does not want to open, at least not in places that have no native openings.
I remember the Braúna tree, deeply scarred by thick carvings.[7] Humans leaving their marks, territorialising, seeking fixity and reassurance. In the absence of a different legacy and connection to the land, tagging screams a desire to state that one has been “here.”
The bark of the Braúna is used medicinally. But when the healer is wounded, who can heal the healer?
Site specific intervention, filmed in 2023, Núcleo do Engordador, São Paulo, Brazil.
I also remember the prickly pear cactus, grown in pots against the deep blue of the Aegean Sea. The scars on the leaves, left by tourists engraving their colonising presence. “I was here,” said the first one. “I was here, too,” echoed the next. And many more followed mindlessly. I am thinking unkind thoughts but I am settling for a milder approach:
the leaves will dry, fall, and become soil, and the human tags will disappear, becoming compost. It is just a matter of time.
As I walk past the plants, I document their scarred skin. The tourists behind me do the same, thinking I find the scarred plants a quirky subject for holiday snapshots.
skin ———————- envelops
_________ a facade _________
I am not particularly scared of blood.
I don’t faint at the sight of it.
I watch the nurse insert the needle into my arm every three months for my blood tests.
More specifically: I watch the needle piercing my vein and the little bottle fill up with my blood.
That’s OK.
Skin keeps the blood—and many other things—contained.
skin ————————– wraps
skin ———— is ———- elastic
skin <> <> <> <> <> <> expands
skin >< >< >< >< >< <> contracts
skin —————————- ages
_______ an adaptation _______
“Every skin has its own history…”
I said as I drew a spiral on the compacted earth of the yard at pIAR.
The body does not end at the skin – true –
but it is this skin that holds me together.
My skin is my carrier bag: it carries me around this world.
It takes me to the airport, where someone drew a line on the ground and called it a border.
Here is where things get complicated.
We are all leaky bio-organisms, a blend of species, constantly exchanging air, fluids, and solids with other living beings around us, both in the present time and across the past and future.
Yet, when we cross these drawn lines on the ground, with machines and cubicles neatly arranged along them and the word “BORDER” prominently inscribed above, we stiffen.
This carrier bag seals tight.
What matters is not so much what it holds inside, but what’s visible on the outside: how it looks, how it’s registered, whether it resembles the little portrait in the document.[8]
tran ————–s ————– kin ———
__________ a movement __________
across boundaries
across skins
across kin
perhaps not becoming (other genders, other species) but coming closer
“making oddkin”[9]
(almost) everything has s-kin
“Why should our bodies end at the skin, or include at best other beings encapsulated by skin?” asks Donna Haraway.[10]
With these thoughts in mind, I return to a familiar location. One I know intimately. One that has seen me grow up, witnessing my various configurations over the years.
In that location, there is another site of wound. Of “development”. Of scarring the land.
Its skeleton lies bare, exposing an attempt to profiteer on sun and sea—the national product for the globalised tourist industry.
Built on common land and halted halfway, this is a building that never grew a skin.
I cannot resist the metaphor: Unfinished buildings / Unfinished bodies.
Eucalyptus trees have colonised the site. I walk around. Rough concrete columns, tree trunks, and my (trans)body.
Tagging screams “here” too. On the rough concrete columns. And on the walls at the back, where human faeces and wet wipes are scattered on the concrete floor. Abjection.
A Eucalyptus tree is growing inside the concrete structure, reclaiming the land. A deep scar is cut around its largest trunk. A wound. I pass my hand over it. Who will heal the healer?
Meanwhile, everyone is
shedding —————— skin ——
__________ a process __________
some: spectacularly (snakes)
some: imperceptibly (humans)
some: with a bang (Eucalyptus trees)
The chunks of the old brown bark contrast with the rough concrete floor, making the process of shedding visible.
But how to surpass the visuality and talk about other senses?
For example:
The texture of the skins —human skin — tree bark — concrete
The exchange of temperature when skins are pressed against each other
The kind of intimacy felt only on the skin
Or:
The fresh, crisp scent of Eucalyptus, a mix of mint and pine, yet somewhat earthy
Or:
The pain on my bare feet stepping on the woody seed pods scattered on the concrete floor.
Confession: Trees against brutalist concrete structures, even if unintended, is the modernist architect’s wet dream. The sticky residue of my background in Landscape Architecture has not been composted entirely yet.
PS:
As I am dancing on a sweaty dancefloor, thoughts come up and morph into ideas.
I quickly brush them away and drown them in a bath of sweat.
I am not here to think.
But ideas are water-resistant, like the phone in my bum bag.
They float to the surface of my skin, they jump on the dancefloor, they do a dance of their own, and with each other.
Then they’re all around me. We touch. We dance apart.
I know what’s going to come next and I don’t resist it.
The ideas migrate onto the shiny skin of my phone. They type themselves into words.
Some words I keep for myself.
Some words I share with others.
Some words I share with you.
Dance with them!
Acknowledgements
- My encounters with more-than-my-human skins have taken place in lands with which I have varied relationships and navigate different power dynamics, including being “native”, local, migrant, tourist, white, not proper white, from the Global North, and from the South of the North. There are infinite entanglements of both actual and perceived class, race, and gender, feeding into economic and climate injustices that I am part of.
- Most of the encounters mentioned in this text have been co-experienced with my partner, Giulia Casalini. Giulia documented my encounter with Braúna in São Paulo and helped me to document my engagement with the Eucalyptus skins in Greece. Giulia has also been involved in editing this text.
- This text would not have been born without the soft but steady encouragement and visionary facilitation of Dani d’Emilia, who made all this possible.
Endnotes
[1] UCSF Transgender Care, “Information on Estrogen Hormone Therapy,” UCSF Health System, University of California, San Francisco, July 2020, https://transcare.ucsf.edu/article/information-estrogen-hormone-therapy#:~:text=The%20first%20changes%20you%20will,sweat%20and%20urine%20will%20change. (accessed September 5, 2024).
[2] Ibid.
[3] Also, its legal boundary.
[4] In imagining skin in conjunction with bioregional plant cultivation, I am thinking with Robin Wall Kimmerer, who proposes nations according to the local food resources people rely upon. Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants (Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions, 2013).
[5] I have explored my s-kin relationship with the fig tree through the iconic fig leaf and its fraught connection with snake skin in a photographic work on the theme of August. Here is a glimpse of this work and some thoughts on geopolitics: https://www.instagram.com/p/C_cy3Bvo3Qa/?img_index=1
[6] “A break, tear, rupture, or cut in skin opens a portal and passageway. Here, too, is both a world and a wound.” Legacy Russell, Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (London: Verso, 2020), 101.
[7] Braúna (Melanoxylon brauna) is a tree species that grows naturally in hillsides of Atlantic Forests in the Northeast and Southeast regions of Brazil. Its conservation status is listed under the “vulnerable” category by the IUCN.
[8] Va-Bene Elikem Fiatsi reminds me that black skin adds yet another layer to the (trans)gender troubles when crossing borders. Her trouble is double.
[9] “Making kin as oddkin rather than, or at least in addition to, godkin and genealogical and biogenetic family troubles important matters, like to whom one is actually responsible.” Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 2.
[10] Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 178.
