Stoma is a communal art project—a body of affective practices that cultivate spaces for reflection and play.
The term stoma, from the Greek for aperture, serves as a guiding metaphor. Openings, mouths, wounds. A deliberate stab into the saturation of contemporary experience.
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This is the act of stabbing the mesh of a saturated present. It’s an invitation to play as a way of thinking. A group of people that make art, as well as the experiences that happen around them. A declaration of intentions and desires. An interruption, a pause. It is a hole with no purpose. Stoma is an erotic gesture. A collective of imaginations that desire mundanity.
Stoma comes from the Greek word otoma, which means mouth or opening.
A Stoma can:
Be produced by oneself / by another / given by birth
Be a voluntary / involuntary opening
Be an entrance / exit / both
Be temporary / permanent
Seek to open / to close
It is possible to go through and come out another side — of the school, the conversation, the dark room, the bright room, the house of worship, the house of hate, the party, the family, the loneliness. When an institution, or a set of market forces, or any convention, any story about what things are and why they are that way, is not for the living, place a nail. Make a hole. Look out.
Crawling through, perhaps just peering through, and finding a space wholly other in configuration may feel like freedom, or panic, or both. Whatever is to be lost, whatever is to be found, best pass through in good company.