I tell myself not to worry about the drooping smile that trickles down my face as I wash off my residual afterglow. It mixes with the warm water and streams of beige pool in the drain. What’s left is blemished, taut and pink. I anchor my hands to my cheeks; only for a moment before I release.

There is a separation between this lived reality and this embodied one. I stand here between them, within this space that borders both conditions.

Movement in the tile catches my glance and I follow the reflection to the floor. Where I’m gathered in this alchemy of objects. I lay with them and in sedate, quiet slouches —One, two, three and hold.

I can feel my chest compress against the floor from the weight of my body, there’s an edge to my inhalation. What’s dry erodes away. Its constraint releases as I sigh to a whisper: «again».

What is it like to be here on the floor?

Alice Darby is an artist based in Oslo orbiting queerness, different temporal paces, bodies, the spaces they inhabit and the performative potentials of art objects. She assembles bodily dysmorphia / dysphoria / the mundanity of dismemberment and her cosmetics. These blur embodying memory both as fictive and autobiographical accounts. They merge to leverage intimacy and estrangement and together become hallucinatory bodyscapes.