“My body is the abyss between me and myself”, wrote Fernando Pessoa, capturing the paradox
of an existence where the self is always divided: the observer and the observed, the bridge and
the void. In the duo exhibition Siamese Others, Elen Braga and William Ludwig Lutgens take up
this metaphysical thread, exploring the blurred boundaries of identity through the lens of
conjoined existence. If the body is a “dream of a bridge”, then here that bridge has become
flesh, or at least a skin of latex. The body is a site of contest and fusion where the path to the
“other” is built into the self, reflecting a world in which we are never truly alone but always
entangled: fused to the gazes, digital echoes and histories of the others we carry with us.
In a departure from their habitual practices, Braga and Lutgens literalize the above tension
through a shared medium: steel, shaped by the plasma cutter and the arc of the weld. This choice
transforms the “abyss” into a visceral act of carving a “self” out of a collective mass, resulting in
works that function as a physical exchange between two voices navigating a single, resistant
material. These conjoined forms oscillate between the psychological and the systemic.