language-based research                         2024                       Cecilie Fang Jensen

at the end of
the sentence,
it rotted

Moving through written words and photographs as documentation, this website serves as a trace of the process of creating the work at the end of the sentence, it rotted.

Not only do I wish for it to document a process, but I hope it gives an insight into my methodology of research. As I within the past six months moved between borders and languages, the work is part of an on-going auto-ethnographic and practice-based research on the interconnectedness of language and the migration of words, when words move from one language to another.

Research that takes form in collaborating with materials and thinking through and with their transformation; reflections I embody in writing, as I similarly use language to explore language itself from within.

When language ends up excluding and including depending on who does and who does not speak, I am interested in a language of materials as a return to a time of pre-linguistics, where sound and touch are prominent.

Materials that speak a language of touch. Materials that together break down individuality to reproduce themselves as a body of multiplicity. A body of multiplicity that in the end sits between categories and linguistic binaries and instead opens a space for language to leak.



Corrosion and rot are processes in the need for oxygen. 
Just like those organic processes, we as humans need oxygen to speak. But for speech to be meaningful, silence is breath in between sentences; a space for possibility before new words find their way. If silence is breath and breath between sentences is a space for introspection, silence is a space to tune in, listen, and seek new possibilities.






Our body; a plural pronoun and singular noun suggests that many inhabit and are inhabited by the body. Instead of pluralizing it into many bodies, it emphasises the singular form of the plural. Our body lets sociality become the fleshy form of many bodily forms, as nobody is fully individual when we get shaped and touched by where we move our body. [1] Our body therefore points to the body as an inter-embodiment where touch opens to other bodies, yet in that opening touch still differentiates.

A body holds skin as a border between inside and outside; creating a separation between I and Others.  But skin is not only containment, it is also a membrane allowing for exposure to other bodies. Skin as a boundary can promise separation if its task remains to keep the Other out. But such a separation points to a relationship between the individual body and a collective one. As such, an individual unmarked body refusing to be touched is a body that keeps others out; and so a body of privilege. A body that is at home, as it can “move through the world with ease – the white, masculine, heterosexual body – does so through expelling those other beings from the zone of the living.” [2] It can remain unmarked, yet label others as marked. Attaching categories of otherness to a body through gazing upon skin. Marking other bodies as strange, when the stranger is someone we fail to recognize.

But “strange bodies do not exist as such, as they can only be assimilated as the unassimilable within the home of the white masculine subject.” [3]
Yet those bodies that remain not assimilated into a dominant social space, are the bodies that are read and recognized by that same space as a threat through histories of carrying words associated with otherness.

As such, a body is a text. A text we read, write and let be touched or remain untouched by others.
[1]     Ahmed, Sara: ‘Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality, Routledge 2000
[2]     Ibid, p. 52
[3]     Ibid, p. 53







Erin Manning raises the question: “If the body cannot be reduced to language, how can we speak of the body? ... How can we locate the importance of the concept of touch for the political?”[4] Following the question, she proposes to look at space as sculpted by the body itself, instead of looking upon it as a place the body inhabits. If space is sculpted by the body, the body becomes the body as touch instead of the body that touches. 

To look at one’s body as touch is to acknowledge how its movement is a language of desire that touch articulates.

The body is always touching the world, but when we make the intentional gesture of direct physical touch, we articulate the desire to meet another and create a shared space of contact. A language mold inhabits as it does not restrict itself or reduce itself to language nor is it bound by skin. Instead, mold inhabits the body as touch. It speaks and inhabits the language of staying open to the bodies of others. 

It’s a reminder of an interconnectedness that has been forgotten and partly undone. An interconnectedness mold fights for, as it includes the organic matter it touches in its constant mode of survival. Mold touches to survive but remains radically open to do so, as its openness is rooted in its interconnected surroundings.

[4]     Manning, Erin: Politics of Touch, University of Minnesota Press, 2006, p. 58




I lost control of my own work and it’s living its own life now.

When it started rotting and producing mold, I realized I had lost control of an organic process I had not predicted. As a creator you are left with two choices and everything in between the two;  you either accept or you interfere. I chose the first. And so, my work produced an abject, when it grew a colony of mold.

My work had produced something that was neither the subject nor the object; something simultaneously outside of itself, yet also inside of it. The abject threatens the concept of individual identity of the self, when the abject is something in between the subject and the object. Something in between itself and something outside of itself. A bodily example would be body fluids; blood, sweat, and any liquid and non-liquid entity as bacteria your body needs that partly gets a life on its own outside the skin. It’s a part of you, but also not.




Julia Kristeva frames a theory on the abject in ‘The Powers of Horror’ as a place where meaning starts to collapse.[5] According to her: “The abject refers to the human reaction (horror, vomit) to a threatened breakdown in meaning caused by the loss of the distinction between subject and object or between self and other.” [6]

Mold gained such meaning to me the moment I was confronted with my work when it entered its second week of being exhibited to the public. One morning I entered the space to be confronted with the unpredictable. In the context of an exhibition space, mold seemed like an intruder. If one parameter of an artwork is re-production, I had lost authority of my work’s reproduction, when it started reproducing itself and the parts of myself I had created it with. Gained a life of its own in interdependence on my touch that I could now be the audience to witness. As an abject being in between things, mold as an abject becomes the place where linguistic boundaries such as self/other and subject/object start to collapse.


[5]    Kristeva, Julia: The Powers of Horror,  Columbia University Press, 1980
[6]    Felluga, Dino: Modules on Kristeva: On   the Abject, Introductory Guide to Critical Theory, 2011, Purdue U.















Mold and rot are usually two processes we consider as disgusting. When something grows moldy, it owns its right to be thrown out. It is to be touched to be thrown, but within the context of the contact, we cannot stop ourselves from feeling a slight disgust. Mold expands onto whatever it touches or enters proximity with and in that process, mold includes any in its fight for survival. Mold is not restricted to a singular body, but it crosses rigid boundaries of categories of identity, as mold is a multicellular fungus having both male and female reproductive organs. A body of mold is built upon hyphae; multicellular branching threads that together form the body of mold. [7] And so mold is not individual, it consists of many when its body breaks down organic matter to reproduce itself into multiplicities. Its skin expands and defies any restrictions of bodily borders; if one gets affected, it affects all. Mold therefore reveals an invisible collective body and a network of invisible relations, even when we pull away from it with the feeling of disgust.

[7]     Biologydictionary.net Editors: Multicellular Fungi, Biology Dictionary, 24th January 2018

Ahmed draws from the feeling of disgust to look upon how language relates to bodies and how some signs are sticky when they touch upon skin. The notion of disgust is sticky and generated through contact. Something becomes disgusting in contact with something else that is already labeled as being disgusting. 
As such disgust functions as a contact zone and carries a performativity. A body being in close contact with anything carrying the label of disgust will get such a label stuck to its skin. [8] But a stickiness does not come from nowhere and a stickiness of disgust is not rooted in nothing. 

Disgust is crucial in the maintenance of power relations. Bodies become objects of disgust through having been in contact with signs of disgust, but signs are effects of “a history of articulation, which allows the sign to accumulate value.”[9] Certain words become insults by being associated with other words they accumulated through history.[8]     Ahmed, Sara: The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Edinburgh University Press, 2014, p. 87
[9]     Ibid, p. 92

Listening is introspection, when to listen is to be aware of how one’s own voice exists in relation to a plurality of other voices. An act of listening is partly also an act of integrating. Integrating sound waves of other bodies - both material and immaterial ones - with one’s own body. It’s letting a body become in one with other bodies and so, creating an inter-being. A simultaneous existence, in which “in this formlessness, we get a chance to reinvent and reimagine the source and form of named identities.”[10]


[10]     Voegelin, Salome: The Political Possibility of Sound: Fragments of Listening, Bloomsbury Academic 2018, p. 120
If language opens bodies to others, it also carries the ability to close off to others, as we pull away from the bodies with words of disgust stuck to their skin. Is mold radically open by being open to be touched by any?

Mold reveals the visibility of invisible networks by growing a skin expanding across multiple bodies; 
a process of forming one body out of many through touch. Mold inhabits the term our body, as it lets sociality become the fleshy form of many bodily forms.