Jocelyn Beausire

eight nights in old territory 🤍 "with any luck, the trash in today's yard is a quiet signal of a new era" - pm

2025 last year, I spent new year's eve in a roadside motel in new paris, ohio, halfway between a place I knew and I place I'd been promised. this year I am spending new year's eve in central new york, insulated by the second biggest snowfall to hit in 30 years. the last time I lived here was the first record-setting winter, 30 years ago. yesterday I lay in the field across from my house, sinking into the twenty inches and feeling my body buoyant, infant again. there is something here about landing. about coming into pieces and gathering oneself, a slow re-aggregation. picking things up, you realize you've gathered more than you lost, extraneous matter has found its way in: a pebble, a sliver of bark, a helicopter seed. I heal much slower than I used to. my edges are blurry, defined by continuous loss and regeneration, the sloughing of cells. a bruise that once vanished now lingers, a reminder of impact. after 31 rotations, this year was a year of becoming. of sunset statue views, of stacking straw and finishing sentences, of living across many spaces, of long kiosk lunches, of stretching thin, of falling a$$backwards, of ferry rides, of lost toenails (rip), of long drives, of introductions and learning curves, of full classrooms, of sick kittens pulled from ditches, of gatherings around soup and loose spoons, of group hugs, of gratitude, of searching, searching, pulling together, finding, parts to whole. not quite, but a semblance of self. to 2026. 🤍🤍🤍

I don't have many true heroes, but she was one of them. Thank you for inspiring my smaller, feral, nature-loving self with your warmth and strength and compassion over the hundreds of hours I spent watching you and the chimpanzees of the Gombe on our VCR. I'll think of you whenever I'm alone in the forest. Goodbye Jane.

Very grateful to be teaching at @syr_arch this fall 🍁 thank you to all who have supported me through the liminality. I feel so lucky to be able to hold space for the radical, transgressive, inspired, optimistic work of young folks, in a time of such violence. building from ruins, truly. teachers in my life - please feel free to send me your advice! always open for a quick call, or a book recommendation, or a word-to-the-wise. I am new in this world, and have much to learn 🤍 first photo by @alexskbrown p.s. I will still be orbiting through the city, even if my center is elsewhere ✨ please reach out + invite me to things

shed exercise 1  an auto-unsettling Upcoming performance from 7/19 - 7/20  at Glasshouse (@glasshouse247 ) as a part of A Permit/To Permit, a 24-hour durational performance festival organized by Lital Dotan (@bylitaldotan ) also featuring the incredible work of @tamarettun @hannes.egger_studio @jossslug @spencertunick @sazonpackets @exshaps for @upstateartweekend Positioning shed as both noun (provider of shade) and verb (to take off, to slough, to molt, to discard) the performing body registers traces of formal decomposition, facilitating both the unsettlement of an abject shed and the processual unsettling of its own subjecthood. Repetitive action blurs the boundaries between actant and object, my body becoming no different than a pile of leftover topsoil, a length of rope, or a broken pair of pliers. Meanwhile the shed -- fragmented, unsettled, and improvisationally recomposed over 24 hours -- struggles futilely to register the shifting material conditions of the landscapes which surround it.  To which site does the shed's representational allegiances lie? From what does it derive its compositional unity (as a cohesive whole, rather than a haphazard assembly of parts)? Or, in shedding and unsettling, does the ship of Theseus lose its identity to the sea? Image: “Farmer of cut-over land moving house to new land. The government bought up the land on which he formerly farmed to take it out of farming. Lake of the Woods County, Minnesota” 1939, John Vachon, US Farm Security Administration

𝔗𝔥𝔢 𝔊𝔞𝔯𝔡𝔢𝔫 / ℑ𝔩 𝔊𝔦𝔞𝔯𝔡𝔦𝔫𝔬 Triennale Milano, May 13 - Nov 9 A collaboration with 19 international teams of scientists, ecologists, engineers, and designers, each donating a single object and image that represents their ongoing research into the ways humans are working with bacteria to co-produce our landscapes and ourselves.  Playing with the systems of classification by which humans seek to relate and "make sense" of other organisms, the gallery is laid out as a matrix, each object propagated on a different intersection. These fragments are defined by their coordinates: the subjects they address (north-south axis - soil, self, surface, structure, and atmosphere) and the operations through which they collaborate (east-west axis - construction, maintenance, conservation, remediation). From a fragment of bacterially-cleaned marble from the Milan Cathedral, to chunks of microbially-stabilized sand from Arizona, to a pile of active biofertilizer, these objects do not exist easily within the system, instead exerting their own slippery, undomesticated agency to resist and renegotiate the terms of their collaboration. Walking through the space, visitors similarly find themselves uneasily indexed -- each body a haphazard assemblage of organisms, existing in a grid that extends indefinitely beyond the Triennale's walls. I am so grateful for the trust that was given to me by Beatriz Colomina, Mark Wigley @wig56 , and the team at the Triennale, to play a small part in this incredible, thought-provoking exhibition, We The Bacteria: Notes Toward Biotic Architecture. I am also grateful to the researchers, whose unending patience and generosity in Zoom calls and emails helped me climb a very steep learning curve. Finally, thank you to GRACE @grace.office , for their skill in designing and co-manifesting my manic excel document in this massive beautiful space, and to my fellow researchers Alessandro Pasero @alessandropasero and Guillermo Arsuaga @gsarsuaga , for their intellect and humor over many kiosk focaccia and campari spritz. Alla prossima, Milano 🤍 7: US Patent 9,796,626 BioMason Brick 8: Robert Oswin Kindler, Self-Healing Wood, ETH Zurich

vibrating matter venezia, quickly

~ turned 30 last week ~ Last february, I helped three lambs enter the world, and one newborn lamb pass through it. Crouching in a freezing barn in Wisconsin, ten miles from where my great great grandparents first farmed after arriving from Scotland, I warmed them and watched them take to fresh legs.  As folds of time and space have overlaid this past year, the lamb is born again and again into my hands, wet and bleating. I revisit it like I do a part of my own body, the tenuousness of each breath, the weight of the cold air on its shaking torso. It chokes on milk, but coughs the liquid from its lungs. It insists on a slow, deliberate pace of survival. I hold it, guard its peace.  Endings, beginnings, relief, grief, and joy. In the midst of my own uncertainty, the many shifts and brinks and weighty expectations of this past year, I reflect on the fact that in this barn, a thousand miles away, the lambs are experiencing the brief sweetness of their lives. I am so grateful for the refuge of the friends and family who have supported me, who have shown me the importance of slowness and softness, who have allowed me to embrace the joy of late night errands, long walks, big hugs, cold beers, and tidepools. Thank you for your patience in teaching me how to use my legs. I can't wait to run with you 🤍

It is absolutely surreal to be flying to Florence next week, to deliver my research at the "Objects. Between Absorption and Isolation" symposium, organized by the Lise Meitner Group “Coded Objects” at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut (@khiflorenz ). I really cannot thank them enough (!!) for the opportunity to intermingle and learn from so many incredible scholars at this stage of my career.  Revisiting (and heavily revising) this research from early in my time at Princeton (from a course with the wonderful Thomas Levin and Gavin Steingo) while rekindling my love of sonic exploration this summer has been a super rewarding and self-actualizing experience. More to come, but for now this. *** "WILL IT CHANGE THE BABY?" Sonic Respatialization and the Politics of Domestic Surveillance with the Advent of Infant Monitoring Systems The Zenith Radio Nurse was invented as a mediation of absence. In 1932, the kidnapping of Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s baby went undetected by both the parents and their designated nursemaid, evidencing to the American public a (fatal) flaw in protective systems of fences and walls, and igniting mass hysteria. To capitalize on these anxieties, Zenith Radio Corporation founder Eugene McDonald enlisted Japanese American designer Isamu Noguchi to design a mode of domestic surveillance by which a baby’s near-silent breaths (and the absence thereof) would be amplified throughout the home. Advertised as “better than a live nurse,” this early monitor performed as a bipartite, dissymmetrical panacousticon: the “Radio Nurse,” cast from brown Bakelite echoing both a defensive Japanese Kendo mask and the head of a (presumably “colored”) nursemaid, to be placed in a room with the parents; and the “Guardian Ear,” a more symbolically innocuous white receiver, to be positioned at the child’s bedside. Supplanting the maid in the ear of the parent, the disembodied Nurse performed a special semiotic violence, gaining agency through its mediality and contributing to the obsolescence of the human it reproduced. (image credits and abstract continued in comments, if you're still with me)

bodies in motion july>august so grateful.

Tolerances (excerpt from ongoing thoughts) The allowable deviation from a standard The relative capacity of an organism to grow or thrive when subjected to an unfavorable environmental factor The capacity of the body to endure or become less responsive to a substance (such as a drug) or a physiological insult especially with repeated use or exposure Tolerances are only able to be comprehended vaguely, relative to their projected utility. They are inherently accommodating, but non-standard (standardizing, although common and even necessary, makes tolerances more calculatedly in-). Tolerance is a gap, created on purpose or mistake, evaluated afterward to be either useful or nuisance. Following this judgment it can be corrected, clamped and seized, or tugged wider open. It undoes itself with generosity. It is willing, but uneasy. Prior to use, it is undomesticated, slightly feral, and very leaky. Tolerance is lonely - innately bound to the stable object, but defined by its distance from it. Precarity, and a kind of grief, begets its presence. It is the difference one is willing to move through, or the space one is willing to bear. Life is established on tolerances - a slow spiral, a continual revisitation to places and selves no longer similar. The incremental offset on each return poses a kind of temporal tolerance (the experience of which can be almost intolerable). I now find myself existing within this uncanny, expectant, unsettling but forgiving void. Photos of my eye bags on one gray day by the wonderful @alexskbrown

four years ago at @soilart looking through photos from before I came east, and realized I never shared these. funny how when you enter a period of incubation, time begins to stack up vertically. every other moment of transition that came before plays out in parallel. stitches through folded fabric.