In Corpus Callosum, Mechtild Widrich, in collaboration with Andrei Pop, examines Emilio Rojas’ performance practice through the interconnected histories of colonialism, borders, land, migration, and the body. Moving from the invasive dandelions of The Lion’s Teeth to the arduous movement of sod across stolen indigenous land in The Grass Is Always Greener and/or Twice Stolen Land, the essay considers how Rojas uses his body as an instrument for tracing the political and ecological boundaries that shape our relationships to place.

Widrich and Pop follow these concerns through Naturalized Borders (a Gloria) and Hands to Hold, revealing an artistic practice in which plants, soil, language, food, and other bodies become collaborators rather than passive materials. Drawing connections between Indigenous knowledge, Gloria E. Anzaldúa’s borderlands theory, queer theory, environmental histories, and the unequal conditions exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic, Corpus Callosum asks what happens when seemingly fixed distinctions—between self and other, human and nonhuman, native and invasive, body and landscape—begin to lose their stability. Across these works, Rojas’ practice emerges as one of interdependence: a means of confronting histories of displacement and inequality while searching for other ways of touching, caring, growing, and surviving together.