I Want it Next to Me

2023, digital video, 7:03

This work explores the extension of body through shed bodily bacteria, and the relationship to it as an otherness self; a past self that carries traces of past places, people, animals and things. 

When our old skin cells compile about the house with other types of bacteria perhaps together it becomes a new, and this empathy sensations bleed into new feelings; encountering a foreign body, and a fascination with being drawn to a different type of body.

I Want it Next to Me extends from Greaves’s 2022 post-graduate project Affective Matter. While Affective Matter focussed on removing and isolating dust, grime and liquid from the home, this work investigates these things in their ‘natural’ habitat; capturing ecosystems of skin cells and other bacteria brought into the home amalgamating and evolving in action.

Here, Greaves reveals a feedback loop between past and present experience - that we may continuously re-experience past lives of ourselves, past body-emotions; once scored into and stored within the body as an imprint of things that have affected us. Not a dejavu - where we believe we are experiencing a moment that we have lived before - but an empathy response to cracks and corners of built up grime, a twin-ship between both ‘dust-body’ and ‘human-body’.

The artist uses dialogue that includes vulnerable emotional responses, and tactile bodily sensations, with footage of her bedroom and bathroom, in hopes of conjuring an overall feeling of wistful-loving and discomforted-ease that reflect this twin-ship.