Public Infrastructure, by Tamara Jones. Text by Aliya Pabani

Video still from, This is a Crisis, 2023. By Tamara Jones

Did you ever see something and pull it and you take it as far as you can and it almost outstretches itself and it goes into something else? 

If you take it so far that it is two things? As a matter of fact, some things if you stretch it so far, it’ll be another thing. Did you ever cook something so long that it turns into something else? Ain’t that right? 

That’s what we're talking about with politics.

- Excerpt from Fred Hampton’s 1969 speech Power Anywhere Where There’s People

Hold your left hand in your right hand. Are you holding or being held? This overlapping sensation is what phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty calls "the chiasm"—the crossing between self as sensing subject and sensible object. As his vision declined, Merleau-Ponty conceived of "flesh" (la chair) not as human tissue but as an elemental material preceding the subject/object distinction, where the self and world are intertwined.

Flesh operates at the boundary between visible and invisible. When you see someone smile, you perceive not just arranged facial muscles but their joy emanating from the expression. The visible contains traces of the invisible, just as speech carries silence and touch exceeds the merely tangible. Flesh is this intertwining where the material world already contains its own transcendence. 

Both “accede” and “exceed” share the latin root “cedere” (to go, yield). To accede means to approach, to yield toward something. Although exceed insinuates its inverse—a moving away from yielding—it actually means to go beyond yielding. To surpass it.

Cedere: To go, yield. 

To proceed forward,

withdraw. 

The root contains its transcendence.

In contact improvisation, yielding is the process of actively responding to a person’s movement and weight instead of resisting it. From the moment of greatest yielding, new possibilities emerge. The responsive body is both internally aware and externally affected. The left and right hand. The body becoming flesh.

Tamara recalls time spent visiting their partner on the coast of San Francisco. The pervasive moisture in the air meant that moss grew on everything, “in weird formations, out of every crack in every piece of concrete, every wall, on plaster. The moss would stick to anything.” 

One of the oldest plants on land, mosses anchor to surfaces with their root-like rhizoids, surviving by drawing water from the atmosphere. Some curl up when they dry out, but the cells don’t disintegrate. Australian desert mosses have been revived with a few drops of water after being stored in a packet for a hundred years, in a state of suspended animation. 

One scene of This is a Crisis features a long metal bench with incomprehensible integrated scaffolding that suggests an awning without providing any cover, in the middle of a field, in the dead of winter. Former mayor John Tory delivers his victory speech in the voiceover: 

“My friends, the campaign may be over, but the renewal of our city, the continuing renewal of our great city, begins now.”

The artist, dressed like a real estate broker, unfurls onto the surface of the bench, legs askew, searching the air.

Harlem 
By Langston Hughes

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up 
like a raisin in the sun ?
Or fester like a sore —
And then run ?
Does it stink like rotten meat ?
Or crust and sugar over —
like a syrupy sweet ?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load .

Or does it explode?