Beyond a veneer of flesh, to be incarnated is to be a vessel – a vessel for the universal, for the immaterial, a vessel for the times. The process of incarnation is the filling of this vessel with its purpose, the life force it wields – and the multiplicity of expressions it can take. These expressions are like ghosts we resonate with; and choose to speak for. Samuel Guerrero’s ghost of choice, in art as in life, is the spirit of contemporaneity itself – its highs and lows, its lack and abundance, its surface and depth.

A: What does being incarnated mean to you?

S: For me, on a very personal level, I have a very conflicted relationship with incarnation. The idea of being embodied first and foremost echoes anxiety.

I grew up being very thin, and this created some anxieties from the perspective of feeling insecure in one’s own body, feeling pressured by family or society to morph it into something else.

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But from a more philosophical perspective, incarnation is a container. A container for the soul and its projections. We exist in and out of the body at the same time. There is this little blurb I wrote the other day just around this topic, actually:

The body can’t survive outside of itself, which is why it clings to containment. The soul, however, can – which is why it roams free.

We feel contained by the body as a surface, as a form, often without looking deeper, and this is why we project all our fears and desires on the machines we create.

‍A: The Western world is very much disembodied because it’s first and foremost driven by rationality and logic, and about experiencing reality through this analytical lens rather than through lived experience. But the body also is a technology to attain the nucleus of things, to attain knowledge. Capitalism did a great job at divorcing people from the knowledge of their bodies.

S: Yes, the body is made into an object that has to be functional and operational for the purposes of capitalism. For example, my sister works in a bank, in an office, and last week she got sick. So she was on sick leave, and it made me think about what the body means to the capitalist system – what a sick body means to the system, and what it means to care for one. What are antibiotics really for?

They’re meant to “cure” you as quickly as possible, from one day to the next. This isn’t for the benefit of the sick, but rather to reincorporate the sick into functionality. To make them useful, operational again.

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A: It’s hard to tell what it means to be healthy, beyond being able to produce.

S: I do sometimes feel like I exist, because I produce. My body is also a medium of production.

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A: But it’s not the same type of production – producing material embodiments of creative energy, and producing work for capitalism. Do you view them as stemming from the same root?

S: I agree that they are different, yet at the same time, not all creative ideas necessarily serve something greater. For example, I have a lot of ideas that I never end up materializing, because I know they are basically Instagram-ready and would probably remain limited to that.