Mercis Rossetti

The loving feeling is a mixture of instinct and cultural learning. ‘Amor de llangardaix’ [“Lizard Love”] is an ode to love and heartbreak, to bodies that mix, their limits blurring. To skin, sweat, exchange. To all that which is pleasure and which is transformed into pain only to begin again. To unconventional love, to lovers, to ex-lovers and to all those parts of the body that do not exist without another.

There are parts of the body that are impossible to classify. They exist on the threshold between two other anatomies that do have their own name. There is no way of naming them other than by describing where they are located. They are spaces of union and coexistence. They are the physical boundary between certain clearly defined elements. The agglutinant that enables a body to exist as a complete unit. They are “lichen anatomies”.

In general they do not exist consciously until another activates them through touch. They live inactive lives. The fold between the fingers and the toes, the empty spaces between the ribs, the joint between the neck and the back of the ear, the space between the clavicles just above the sternum, the skin under short nails. All these fragments have something of a phantom quality, of absence due to lack of attention, and live in hibernation waiting for someone else to activate them.

This series of analog photographs in colour and black and white illustrates the need for the skin to be caressed and for bodies to touch, each image forming a link in the infinite chain of love and heartbreak.