Suture

Morten Søndergaard with Åse Eg

48 Pages
Hand-bound with a medical thread and needle
Edition: 300

ISBN 978-3-943196-42-9

How can we rethink a dissonance between language and materiality that is as old as Western civilization itself? Are there ways of articulation and inscription that follow different rules than the symbolic sign-structures of human language? What would such strange alphabets look like?

Broken Dimanche Press is proud to present Danish poet and artist Morten Søndergaard's project Suture, an inquiry into the possibilities of detecting and documenting a different kind of language, a semantic trace deeply engraved in the physical existence of our bodies. The project is an archeological investigation into the etymology of the word ’suture’, exploring the horizon of meanings that inhabit this word.

For Suture, Søndergaard has ventured into the catacombs of Paris to photograph, and later transcribe one hundred different sutures, collecting them all in one, single line. These 'readymades' form an enigmatic and collective story of and by bodies that for a long time haven’t met the standards for such categories as 'life' or 'identity'. Suture, thus, discloses an arcane underground archive of (non-)human inscriptions, another – and quite literal – kind of subconscious. The scriptures are retrieved from the skull, the very container of human thought, and as such they come to symbolize a 'mattering', a semiotic force deep within the most intimate spaces of being that cannot be reduced to the articulations of a finite, human subject.