Leave a gap like a door

Leave a Gap Like a Door is an installation developed as part of the research residency Cripping Cultural Work at MaMA. It works with the question of how cultural work measures value through productivity, continuity, and clean timelines, and pushes back against the way care and chronic illness get translated into so-called CV gaps, time counted as absence.

Time slows into maintenance: pacing, refusal, adaptation. Video, voice, textiles, and a makeshift fort sit in a non-hierarchical relationship, each carrying the project’s weight. A spoken text holds the narrative through the video. A sensory chair routes that voice through the body, so the work can be met beyond hearing. From the back of the armchair, a fort begins: a shelter from productive time, a room for crip time.

The fort begins with a domestic practice. My son builds forts. He calls them “a place to go and cry.” This one is stitched from new embroideries alongside pieces passed down through family. Older works curate perfect domestic moments, like a CV. New stitches answer with what gets omitted: waiting, grief, fear, anger, and small helps. The fort welcomes children, offering a place in the gallery that lets them in.

The work was shown in And I’ll be back to perform health for you at MaMA, Rotterdam, and in Thinking in Textiles at Nieuw Charlois, Rotterdam.