BODYBUILDER

In BODYBUILDER, Derek Coulombe forms an elliptical correspondence between his own experience of Tourette’s Syndrome and Umberto Boccioni’s futurist sculpture Unique Forms of Continuity in Space. In this hybrid genre work of fabulist criticism Boccioni's sculpture becomes an obsessively deconstructed central character through which Coulombe reflects on the inherently repetitive, scatological, and convulsively queer properties of his own Tourettic situation. 

  Tourette’s Syndrome (a movement disorder that causes involuntary tics, convulsions, movements, and utterances) causes a body to assume specific physical shapes in the world without the body having meant to do so, and in this way, produces a scenario where the affected body is both assuming postures as well as watching these postures being enacted from a remove. This forced, partial removal creates a unique situation where Coulombe can view his body as an external object—as a series of surfaces and volumes—as something more like a sculpture or a painting. From this specifically disordered framework, Coulombe takes Unique Forms of Continuity in Space as a kind of malleable proxy where the sculpture becomes a figurative hub for an exploration of disabled embodiment and movement through the production of increasingly aberrant fictive vignettes.

 Derek Coulombe is based in Toronto where he writes poetry and prose about embodiment, artworks, speculative physicality, and the relationships between materiality, bodies, and critical disability. In 2022-2023 he was the Chester Dale Interdisciplinary Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, during which time he wrote BODYBUILDER. 

Paperback | 84 pages | 5" x 7"