Bamboo, cotton string, jute rope, vellum, rice paper, sumi-e ink, tape, stone, wooden beads, mycelium
Just as the classic Zen image of the inkwash circle teaches us that the form (the circle) is only a tool which helps us to observe the formless (the space inside the circle); so too is the body the form and container through which that which exceeds the body is summoned. Sacred space is made when an invitation is issued for disintegrated (past, memory, ghosts) or excessive things (excessive: as in, that which exceeds us) to reinhabit the body.
And yet, the body is always already inhabited—by stowaway ghosts, fugitive gods. Afro-Brazilian feminist insurgent Beatriz Nascimento has said the body is the territorialization of memory. We do not choose our inheritances—our task is only to receive them. Making sacred is a question of how to receive with grace. How do we choose to offer ourselves up to be inhabited by the memories out of which we are already made? The question is a paradox; however, as Thich Hat Nanh has said: Everything true is a paradox. Destiny is chosen. The body is both seized and offered. The formless can only be gestured at through form. The sacred dwells inside the earthly.
Fugitive Gods asks after our own sacred bodies: How does that which is bound by form—the recalcitrant matter of our own bodies—sing a ceaseless ode to that which exceeds it? How does our earthly flesh and skin bespeak divinity and deep haunting?