Fluid Borders – Queering Borders

Maria Kapajeva created this cyanotype in the summer of 2025 on the banks of the Narva River, at the border between Estonia and Russia, half a year after undergoing preventive cancer surgeries. Her new queer body no longer fits within a binary understanding of gender, yet nature offers countless examples of organisms that possess both female and male reproductive organs, or that reproduce without sexual organs altogether. Alongside her own body, the artist imprinted plants growing along the Narva River onto the fabric, including ferns and yarrow. By portraying herself as part of the river, Kapajeva points to the fluid and ever-changing nature of the human body. Everything that lives contains water; it exists everywhere on Earth, from the clouds to the underground depths. Through the global water cycle, all bodies are connected within one vast body of water.

In the cyanotype technique, the surface of paper – or in this case, fabric – is coated with a slowly reacting light-sensitive emulsion. The method is primarily used to create photograms: objects are placed on the light-sensitive surface, and after exposure to light, their silhouettes are captured onto it. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the technique was popularised by Anna Atkins, who is regarded both as the creator of the first photobook and as the first female photographer. Over the course of a decade, she published three books containing photograms of British algae.