HUMXN

In the age of repeatedly arguing over its essence, the word ‘human’ is never equal to being human. Scanning the UNITED’s list of migrants and refugees who lost their lives in futile attempts to enter Fortress Europe – the documentation of the deaths of over 40,000 people – raises the question: ‘Rather than numbers, initials, and the locations where their bodies were found, who were these people?’ The endless repetition of the list ignited an urgency to search for the meaning feeling of being ‘human’. The utterance of the word ‘human’ for every documented humxn in the list is a ritualistic attempt to cultivate a more humane denotation for ‘human’. Drawing from the psychological phenomenon of semantic satiation, the work asks: Could the word ‘human’ flee from its inadequate definitions and arrive at a more embodied understanding?