assemble

assemble is a 5 × 8 × 10 foot installation produced for Liminal Forms, Fodoreanu's MFA thesis exhibition at The Invisible Dog Art Center, Brooklyn, in 2023. The work translates the same Vesalius muscle-figure that anchors Cor Fabrica — from De Humani Corporis Fabrica (1543) — into a different material register. Silk screens of the figure's outline are layered parallel to one another in space, suspended perpendicular to a birch base which carries skipped-line drawings of the same form. The figure repeats and recedes; the body becomes a diagram of itself in depth.

A directional speaker plays a two-minute audio loop of a newborn's heartbeat, recorded by Fodoreanu. assemble sits in formal kinship with Cor Fabrica: both works take their visual ground from Vesalius, both translate the dissected anatomical figure into a contemporary sculptural language, and both ask what the medical body becomes when it is removed from the medical context. Where Cor Fabrica answers in mirror-polished steel and civic permanence, assemble answers in fabric, line, and air — the same body, made provisional, made transparent, made plural.

There is a privilege, an honor but also a blight in holding a heart in my hands, figuratively or otherwise — or looking in the depths of unguarded eyes — and what has been witnessed with the entire part of my being is this sameness that we have among each other, this unique but similar condition in front of the paramount steps of our existence — the fragile flame lingering a few moments later or a few less — the sublime contradiction between the strength in the face of the most excruciating circumstances or a fatal weakness to the most subtle blowing of the winds.

Exploring the alive body, a body full of life as a witness to the passing of time, as a pergament of experiences, a tabula rasa being written on and all over, and such decaying, gives us this most crucial information about a unifying human factor. It is the human body changing from a normal to a pathologic state, but not from a disease or abject point of view, but more so to how the dents and the folds of nights and days modify the occupying soul, altering, changing the flesh, whispering, inspiring to an all-standing, tall, resilient stance — as if the presence itself over time is testifying to a prowess despite its vulnerable porous form. A resilience, a noble stance, an ephemeral presence, a persevering in the utmost dryness or fading away completely at no moment's notice — a Contrapposto of its own sort.

Can we spread the word about possibly a new humanism, evolved from this deeper understanding of the fellow human? To attempt to further people into a potent understanding and acceptance of each other. As a pediatrician I watch closely as the newly breathing bodies appropriately follow and fill a mold slowly revealed during the last millenniums of medical knowledge. I am on the precipice of catching any deviations, doing my hardest to modify any stray angles of growth, of body and character, striving to align them towards most augmented perspectives, preserving their potential, optimism, generosity.

And the more I do this the more I realize that I need to expand the circle, to get ahead of the curve, and be able to raise the awareness and hope of multitudes. I need to relay and try to influence people simultaneously, I need an echo to stay ahead of the full strength of the river, unstoppably coming strong. Beyond words in a small medical office, beyond singular gestures and actions in the confinements of an exam room.

I need to tell loudly that we all have the experience of a body no matter what, that we all carry it for the entirety of our lives. That things happen to our body independent of our ills to each other, faith breaking, pain ensuing, wrinkles deepening. That despite all the bends, dents, and cuts, and all the rest, whatever is human is still pulsating until the end. That the resilience of the human spirit is ever present. That we all have a heartbeat as the mark of our living.

And maybe it will be striking to everyone, as it is striking to me, that there is a drop in us that continues to resonate despite our bodies decaying. That we all share the experience of carrying a body, and the heartbeat is that quintessential property, the echo of life in ourselves, that has the potential to unite us in a pure, simple synchronous vibration.