ribs/rebra

Can we be born guilty? Starting from an account of a medical condition, the author uses animation to search for the origin of the elements of the story we tell ourselves about our lives.

The making process both replicates and confronts the rumination and the obsessive qualities of guilt through the slow, tedious work of traditional animation, where each frame is drawn by hand, constantly rewinding and skipping slightly forward — only to go back again. What results is a sensorial meditation on the material weight of feelings. In an uncertain time, the artist mediates the discomfort of an embodied wrongness with the certainty of organic forms in motion, their flowing rhythmic gestures, the imagined solidity of any outline other than one's own.

Ribs is an exploration of what it means to think that there is something fundamentally broken in you and a speculative proposal for how to live with it.