Opacity explores a state of living in-between—between languages, bodies, environments, and modes of perception—experienced while adapting to a new place. Emerging from bodily sensations of misalignment such as blurred vision, dryness, and difficulty speaking, the work treats these conditions not as problems to resolve but as signals of an altered mode of existence.
Drawing on Édouard Glissant’s notion of the right to opacity1, the project understands opacity as a refusal to be fully legible, translated, or assimilated. Rather than a lack of clarity, opacity becomes an ethical position that resists demands for transparency and immediate comprehension, preserving difference and complexity.
The work also resonates with Michelle Murphy’s concept of alter-life2: forms of living shaped within compromised or unfamiliar environments where bodies metabolise uncertainty rather than overcome it. Through moving image and layered visual perception, Opacity dwells within this unresolved state, attending to breath, sensation, and blur as conditions of dwelling, adaptation, and quiet resistance.
