an orgy for ten people in one body

on seeing isabelle albuquerque talk about her art last night

Last night, I saw Isabelle Albuquerque speak. When she came in the room, I stopped breathing. The force of her presence was so powerful and her voice was so quiet. This kind of calling to attention (ten hut, love warriors) sometimes feels scary, but I have nothing to protect, not from this work — everything that’s walled needs to be lost, let go. Radical multiplicity, she says, which is a relinquishing, like a carapace, of the old stodgy self, I-as-I. Give into the flow — the ever-shifting transition that marks true freedom. So says Wojnarowicz, who buried himself alive. That’s the kind of artistic courage you gain when you stop guarding your kingdom of I.

Albuquerque flipped through her slides, back and forth, which is how her ideas felt, coming so fast — a honeyed indoctrination out of (and into) the everyday.

Transhumanism, she said. Nonchrononormativity. What is time, we all say, internet glib, but really, seriously, we’re asking. After the talk, my friend Kara said nonchrononormative was her new identity (a new word for something she knows about herself). I joked to an imaginary time cop, stop being so chronophobic. Aren’t we all, tho.

But radical multiplicity means time can happen all at once, so we are not stuck only in this specific unending 2025. On the screen, there is a sculpture of a stone mattress, uncanny in how plump it looks, you can feel your hand sink into it, feel the prick of feather, a quill under the cloth, your mouth wants to bite it, centuries old. There is the reclining goddess, millennia old, on top of it, and me in my seat, agape, and somewhere, too, in the room already, me in the future writing about the talk, and the students, fingers already moving in memory of what they will make after hearing Isabelle Albuquerque talk.

The artist, herself like a statue at the podium, in her stillness, yes, but I come to see something chosen and transcendent about her body, something she chose, and made transcendent, there behind the podium and replicated in the language of different materials in her work. Just a person, too.

Through study, silence, and some kind of private experimentation, she made the work first in the rehearsal of poses — how then does a writer rehearse, where to find that private stage, sacred, profane, the mess of it — away from the killing gaze of those, real and real-inside-of-us, who want to blot out the unknown? How, esp when that killing gaze seems ambered up inside language itself?

So, I feel The Rite of Spring chaotic inside at the idea of brass and walnut as languages, of magic as a material, of what Albuquerque learned method acting her way into this body of work, into fluency with these languages: eating like a deer, sleeping in a cave, playing a saxophone with her pussy, the polymath she became in all these new-old languages she is speaking through. There behind the podium, she seems to be speaking them all at once — I am grateful to be awe-struck, slackjaw in the face of how this work has undone the self.

After writing this, I feel struck and agitated. I don’t want to stop writing or move away from it, not wanting to person, not yet.

A great contraction comes, though, in the wake of that pouring forth — this must be birth, then, and we hold our fear close to us because it’s part of what we’re birthing — placental, nourishing if it doesn’t it rip us from within.

A crow flies past the window, lit up in his darkness against the sweet flame of amber leaves. My system relaxes to name this: very quickly in the wake of an exuberant open-throated confession of admiration, of awakening, comes a quaking. This tremor is chihuahual, it says: I must’ve messed in the house of art.

Little sir, this doesn’t concern you. You’re safe until you’re not, and none of your whimperings will change your lot. Here’s a small soft bed you can retire in, your vigilant services are no longer needed. You can’t protect us from the mailmen of doom, come to deliver his messages from the agreed-upon world — his tax bills and evictions, his exiles and executions. You are play acting this small fear because the real terrors outsize us all. So sleep, leave the windows to the crows, go deaf to the doorbells — sleep, old man, there’s nothing you can protect us from, there never was.

You can keep naming the agitation as it morphs — from elation to fear — and then dissipates. There’s a kind of repair in staying with the “good” and the “bad.” Because the arrested presence I felt listening to Albuquerque talk about her work was not “good,” it was, it so brightly, electrically, frighteningly was. And the after-agita of that little aging chihuahua self, after writing about the experience, is a gift, too — to be able to look a very old fear and self-doubt in its snaggle-tooth face, regard the one that used to tower over me like a god, a god that got off on my punishment and silence. How almost lovable he is now, in his familiar nips and grumbles, snoring under my writing desk.

How exhilarating and scary, even right now, especially right now, to try to dismantle the scaffolds and shelters, to try to live life itinerate, bare to the new.

Portland folks, you can see Albuquerque’s show alongside the phenomenal work of Louise Bourgeois, The Wandering Womb, at the Lumber Room through January 31, 2026.