Before Speech explores a zone of experience that exists before language, before things are named, fixed, and separated. I’m interested in what happens when we resist defining the “it” at the center of our experience. Without a name, meaning doesn’t fully settle; identity and form stay fluid. I return to this pre-verbal space where distinctions haven’t yet hardened into categories.

In this performance for the camera, I balance my body’s weight against an animal stomach on opposite ends of a wooden seesaw. The image portrays the encounter between the two subjects in a condition void of language, where the tensions between human rationale and animal instinct are negotiated through play, pressure, and movement. 

The body, particularly the gut, is my primary point of interest. In both Western and Eastern medicine, the gut is regarded as the body's second brain. It holds a place where sensation “speaks” before words do: a chill in the navel, heat in the diaphragm, a stomach’s whisper. I treat these visceral signs as knowledge that lives beyond logic, on the other side of rationale. They are more than processes of transformation, passage, and release; they are a conversation between two centers of perception, the rational and the instinctive.

I am interested in the thresholds where inside becomes outside, and where what was once part of us turns into something else. Between the mouth and the anus, the gut carries the space between entry and exit. In that in-betweenness, I locate a kind of temporal and existential suspension. A limbo of all that was, is, and will be, before speech organizes it. In this work I invite attention to this unstable, pre-linguistic zone, where embodied knowledge holds the connective tissue between the self and the other.