Like Graham’s snake, my stride tells more than mere work. Too often our bodies go about their business and we oblige. But even the need to go points elsewhere. The visible traces of a person’s walk belong to invisible mechanics. We forget—the body and mind are inextricably tied—and it is abstracts like desire and passion that steer us. Before the beautiful, the sublime, we are not just transformed; we are “moved.”

These photos make clear that I am at work. I have always been drawn to materials of pure function (rope, pails, wood). I find promise in what is still raw, in what hasn’t been pieced together. My photographs hark back to a history of performance art (most notably, Tehching Hsieh and Linda Montano’s Rope Piece). Where I differ, though, is in my medium translation of Graham’s poem. It acted invisibly. The simple act of recitation made a deeper room for it, and perhaps that is the magic of language and why just as much as it is the author’s, it is the reader’s. Unlike for Hsieh and Montano, this was not an act of endurance. The rope that maps the movements it decides indebted my body to Sofia’s. Being that we see only as an ‘I,’ it is in relation to others that we can determine ourselves at all. But I did divert. Each time the rope tightened, Sofia knew—I erred. To map movement is to realize that the body is unsharable. Any relationship is a forfeit of rights, but I must reconcile that this body is private and that biology announces its exclusivity.