2025 | Sole Author | In progress
Breast as Apparatus explores the breast not as a biological attribute or symbolic object, but as a material and semiotic interface through which gender, care, sexuality, loss, and medical knowledge are actively produced. Rather than centering around a singular narrative of womanhood or motherhood, the project treats the breast as the central element of the observer-observed apparatus in a set of mutable boundaries that define multiple potential arrangements and ontologies.
Across sculptural configurations and photographic documentation, the work investigates how the breast becomes legible in different ways depending on the apparatus that engages it: maternal care, sexualized gaze, prosthetic attachment, surgical removal, or clinical imaging. Identity is approached not as fixed or internal, but as contingent and enacted through material relations.
This project originated in an auto-fiction essay written as a chapter of a fiction book, but also as a research auto-referring element. The text explores questions around desire, motherhood, loss, gender, and clinical observation and the apparatuses through which bodily boundaries can be tested before taking material form.
Rather than serving as reflection on the work, the essay functioned as an intra-active site where my lived experience, feminist theory, and techno-scientific encounters—particularly medical imaging—begin to blur the distinction between observer and observed.
The project draws on feminist materialism, which understands phenomena not as pre-existing entities but as produced through specific material–discursive arrangements. From this perspective, the breast does not carry an inherent meaning; it becomes what it is through the apparatuses that act upon it.
Medical imaging, for example, does not simply reveal the breast but participates in producing it as an object of knowledge. Similarly, motherhood, sexuality, and gender identity are not expressions of an underlying essence, but configurations enacted through care practices, gazes, technologies, and acts of classification. The breast functions as a fluid interface: a site where boundaries between self and other, body and technology, intimacy and control are continuously negotiated.
At the center of the project is the Breast Apparatus, surrounded by multiple relational configurations that operate as distinct “cuts” through the same embodied system:
Womanhood
female body + breast
The breast as a stabilizing marker of gendered embodiment, shaped by cultural norms of femininity and coherence.
Motherhood / Breastfeeding
female body + breast + son
The breast as a relational organ, extended through dependency, nourishment, and asymmetric care. Where does the woman end and the son begin? does the breast belong to the son? or does the breast belong to the mother? Where do we draw the boundary, and what are we leaving behind in each new definition of motherhood and care.
Post-Mastectomy
female body − breast
Absence as a material condition, where removal reconfigures bodily identity, memory, and future imaginaries. Is a woman without a breast still a woman? Does removing a breast, and therefore redrawing the female boundaries, creates instant new identities?
Transgender / Prosthetic Configuration
son + breast
Gender as enacted through prosthetic and relational apparatuses rather than biological origin. What happens when the son desires the breast not as a sexual external object but as