stills from two channel video
Ya-Te-Veo/I-See-You
Two channel video: 8 min (loop) with sound.
hand crafted suit: sycamore, ash, pear, beech, walnut, cherry, oak, mahogany, ginseng, boxing mouthguard, airplane cable, jewelry hardware, furniture strap, tape, dress lining, synthetic brush bristle
2025
This work emerges from our ongoing research into the subject–object relationship, a line of inquiry we have approached through the figure of the carnivorous plant and its circulation across cultural imaginaries. Central to this research is the legend of Ya-Te-Veo, the so-called man-eating plant reported in Western newspapers following late nineteenth-century expeditions to South America. Whether myth or fabrication, Ya-Te-Veo reveals how narratives of the “exotic” and the “dangerous” were mobilized to construct otherness. The carnivorous plant became a site onto which colonial anxieties and desires were projected—an inversion of the natural order in which the human, presumed apex subject, might itself become prey.
The nineteenth century’s fascination with carnivorous plants followed by Romanticism’s appetite for the sublime. These plants troubled the presumed hierarchy between human and nonhuman, destabilizing anthropocentrism by imagining a vegetal agency capable of devouring the human body. In this reversal, the boundary between subject and object collapses: the observer risks becoming the observed; the eater risks being eaten. The plant, once passive background, assumes an active and even predatory role. Through this inversion, the trajectory of anthropocentric thought bends, opening a space in which the human is no longer sovereign.
At the core of our practice lies an ongoing negotiation between self and other. This negotiation unfolds across multiple scales: between our bodies and the materials we work with; between distinct cultural epistemologies; and between inherited narratives and lived experience. Contemporary thought often organizes itself through binaries—the pure and the contaminated, the ancient and the modern, the rational and the mythical. Such divisions create narrow channels through which each side can encounter, translate, or “digest” the other. In this restricted circulation, difference becomes something to be consumed rather than inhabited.
The handmade wooden suit for two people is both sculpture and apparatus for inhabitation. It requires two bodies to enter a single constructed form, binding them into a shared structure. The suit is not worn in the conventional sense; it is held in place by the jaw, secured through a boxing mouth guard whose plastic membrane wraps around carved wood. The entire weight and balance of the sculpture are negotiated through the mouth—an organ of speech and of consumption. In this configuration, language and appetite converge. To hold the work is to bite into it; to speak is to risk destabilizing it. The mouth becomes both anchor and threshold.
The tendrils extending from the suit are turned on the lathe, their spiraling forms unfolding like a typographic gesture translated into wood. Each curve reveals an intimate conversation with the material, unrolling layers of matter settled over time. Wood grain, density, resistance—these are not neutral properties but active participants in the shaping of form. The tendrils possess a controlled, ligament-like 180-degree motion derived from puppet joinery, suggesting both animation and constraint. They hover between botanical growth and skeletal articulation, evoking a body that is at once vegetal and animal, tool and organism.
Our search to dissolve the duality between thought and form leads us to inhabit—and be inhabited by—our own sculpture. Inside the suit, two bodies share breath, balance, and vulnerability. The distinction between interior and exterior becomes unstable. Who supports whom? Who moves, and who is moved? The process of making provided a space to negotiate the tension between eating and being eaten, between mastery and surrender. The sculpture stages this ambivalence physically: the jaw grips the wood even as the wood presses back against the teeth.
For us, making is a mode of research. To speak directly with matter through our bodily matter is to articulate knowledge that precedes or exceeds language. The handmade wooden suit is not merely an object representing the dissolution of binaries; it is a lived experiment in mutual dependency. By binding two people within a single carved structure, it proposes a form of coexistence that resists easy digestion. In doing so, it reimagines the subject–object relationship not as a hierarchy, but as a continuous exchange—an entanglement in which we are always, simultaneously, holding and being held.