Nicolás Lamas at SABOT, Cluj-Napoca

The body is not a stable form but the outcome of forces, attachments, and displacements that exceed it. It is neither a closed entity nor a fixed identity, but a provisional arrangement sustained by relations that pass through it and alter it in ways that cannot be reversed. The corporeal cannot be understood as an autonomous unit, but as a field of interactions in constant reconfiguration, where matter remains open to exchange and exposure.

To exist is to be exposed. Exposed to time, to pressure, to language, to technology, to the gaze, and to the influence of other material agents. The skin does not separate interior from exterior in any absolute sense. Rather than a boundary, it is a zone of exchange where such distinctions begin to dissolve. Nothing touches a body without altering it. Every proximity produces an inscription, however subtle. Matter retains the memory of encounters through tension, wear, and traces that surface in different degrees of transformation.

The body never ends at its anatomical limits. Its existence extends through tools, prostheses, technical devices, support structures, and systems of measurement that continually reshape its relation to the world. The technical is not an external layer added to a previously complete organism; it participates in its formation and alters what the body can do, perceive, or withstand. Each technology opens new possibilities while introducing new forms of dependence. Between body and technique there is no clear opposition, but a relation of mutual formation in which both are continuously transformed. The human does not stand apart from the material systems it inhabits, but is distributed through them.

From this perspective, no body precedes the relations that compose it. Every bodily form is already the result of transfers, affects, and mixtures. What we call identity does not exist before these processes but emerges from them in ways that remain partial and unstable. The distinction between the own and the other cannot be secured once and for all, since every body absorbs something of what it encounters. Contamination should not be understood as degradation or loss, but as a basic condition of material existence. To live is to exchange matter, energy, affects, information, and forces with what surrounds us. In this sense, the notion of an absolute limit begins to dissolve. The threshold becomes an active surface where negotiation is constantly taking place.

Contact never occurs without friction. To approach something is to modify it, just as one is modified in return. Every observation, every act of preservation, every attempt at knowledge participates in this slight but unavoidable intervention through which things are transformed. The body thus appears as a temporary stabilization within a shifting assemblage, where multiple processes overlap and continuously recompose themselves.