Nicole Crozier & Sanita Fejzić – a collaborative project
(2018)
Reindeer, mood and sheet moss, along with hair lichen, slowly take over this portrait of writer Sanita Fejzić by Nicole Crozier. Subverting human essentialism and traditional portraiture, Mossification is a highly stylized and choreographed triptych representing our messy, intra-active material world.
Fejzić’s portrait is quickly taken over by moss, erasing her face and leaving only the contour of her bust in the final photograph. This movement away from human essentialism toward representing non-human agencies gestures toward two distinct but mutually constitutive ideas: intersubjectivity and transcorporeality.
Intersubjectivity suggests a shared, social subjectivity between minds. It can be understood as thought communities or as psychic energy moving between subjects. Is it possible that we are intersubjective with the non-human organic world around us? Material feminists suggest we are transcorporeal; that is, humans are open-ended systems interacting with other open-ended systems. A commonplace example of this are microorganisms such as bacteria that make up as many, if not more, cells in the human body. We are water, air and other organisms, quite literally. How do we capture a portrait of Sanita Fejzić, then, when other life forms have agencies over her body and mind?
Mossification flamboyantly embodies the post-human promise that a person can exist beyond being simply human. We are porous, permeable and always changing. Other life forms have agencies over us. Moss may be small but it has power. We hope this triptych reminds you of the beauty and power of nature-cultures while simultaneously raising questions of ethics and responsibility in our trans-species material world.
– Sanita Fejzić
NICOLE CROZIER 