Interphase: Nepantla

Interphase is the stretch of the cell cycle between one division and the next, when the cell is not dividing and is not resting either. It is doing the work that makes the next division possible.

Nepantla is Nahuatl for the middle place. Gloria Anzaldua took it up for the condition of being between worlds and belonging to neither.

Five works from 2024 in cut paper, ink, acrylic and collage. Overlapping ovoids stacked down a column. A node-and-edge polyhedron on a chartreuse ground. Biomorphic forms interlocking so the white voids between them carry the pattern. Some read as organism, some as inscription, and none of them picks.

This is the body where the two readings were still one thing and I did not yet know I would separate them. It is named twice because one name was not enough.