“Fragility is not a weakness to be corrected but a method.
What is broken does not call for repair so much as reconfiguration.”
Röthlisberger Belkacem, March 2026
At the centre of Standing on Open Scars stands Unbreakable Core, a tower clad in a mosaic of broken mirrors. A structure that embodies a politics of fracture: standing upright, not despite its fragmentation but reinforced because of it. Its surfaces, in turn, reject a single unified image, instead returning a web of diversified reflections. Integrity, here, appears as a normative fiction—an ableist ideal grounded in continuity and control. Standing on Open Scars proposes an unstable, fractured core in which the unbreakable is not the untouched, but rather that which persists.
The encounter between artist and space itself began outside of the conventional structures of legitimisation. It originated in an everyday moment of contact: a dog’s spontaneous closeness to a child opened a space for exchange between the artist and the space. What might appear anecdotal introduces another form of genealogy, grounded in relational rather than competitive, lived experience rather than institutional protocol. Their dog, Pussie, is celebrated in three portraits, BFF (poses 1-3), which consecrate their place in the narrative.
Several perspectives inform the exhibition’s framework; from a crip perspective, autonomy is revealed not as a neutral ideal but as an exclusionary norm that privileges self-sufficiency over interdependence. From a feminist perspective, care is not secondary labour but a condition that structures the possibility of relation. From a postcolonial perspective, that which resists translation resists appropriation.
Populating the space are several crocheted entities from 2024, Say Hello to my Little Friends, each offering a relational moment: to be cared for, observed, wary of, worn, or held and listened to.
In a world shaped by the extraction of resources, bodies, narratives, and identities, that which cannot easily be converted into value is suspect. TOZ, a single word rendered in red neon, becomes an oblique part of this landscape. It resists translation, refusing to be absorbed into a dominant system of meaning. Instead, it asserts a limit: you will not possess me.
Unbreakable Core remains the exhibition’s anchor: a reconfigured structure that neither strives for repair nor purity, but continuity within the cracks.
