Tracing What Remains

There is a moment, just before something disappears, when it becomes most visible. The body moves, disrupts, and lingers—its presence undeniable—until it fades, leaving only a trace. In this tension between presence and absence, between inscription and erasure, I find myself questioning whether art is an act of making or unmaking.

To exist is to leave a mark, but every mark contains within it the inevitability of its own disappearance. The body carries this contradiction: it constructs meaning through movement, shaping space with its presence, yet every step it takes also unwrites what was there before. In this sense, making and unmaking are not opposites, but inseparable forces.

Space, too, is never neutral. It is written and rewritten by the bodies that pass through it, marked by histories that persist even in their erasure. A city is not simply its structures, but the gestures of those who inhabit it—their touch, their labor, their silent acts of defiance or survival. To dismantle what has been built is not always to destroy; sometimes, it is to reveal, to uncover what was hidden beneath.

The act of unmaking is often mistaken for an end. But what if it is a beginning? To undo something is also to prepare for what comes next, to carve space for a possibility not yet realized. If the body is an archive of its own movements, then what happens when it is no longer there? What remains—the absence, the impression, the silence—might be more real than what was ever built.

John Berger writes that "the dead are the imagination of the living." This is not an abstraction; it is a reorientation of presence. The moment the body ceases to move, it does not vanish—it transforms into something else. Tony Goodwin’s body, reduced to carbon, re-enters the physical process of the world, and yet, he remains within the nexus of time, present in absence. In death, the body does not escape history but instead becomes part of its fabric, like the traces left in a city by those no longer there.

Is this not what happens in art? An act of unmaking is not an act of erasure but an act of reconfiguration. It is a way of placing something at the edge of time, at the boundary between past and present, where absence can be more enduring than presence. Berger speaks of the dead as "all-that-the-living-are-not," but perhaps they are also all that the living continually reconstruct.

So I ask you: Can something only exist for as long as it is being undone? Or does its absence shape us more than its presence ever could?