I.

It all started when I was chipping frozen milk flecks with the wrong end of the spoon into my coffee at the cabin. I left the carton outside overnight, resting in a snowbank. The cold had lured us out of bed before dawn to huddle around the wood stove. It was the morning after we harvested the rabbit from a snare fixed to a spruce branch—now a friend sat with her, dissecting her body into parts, her blood pooling onto the cardboard splayed out on the cold floor.

The icy milk chips thawed upon impact with the coffee, failing to incorporate and, instead, floating as a speckled mass of oily whiteness. It produced a reaction in the others—the visceral sort; disgust, like my own flinching, looking into the hare’s jet-black eyes or watching this friend’s hands peeling her fur off in one distorted piece. Two snow-white forms, in from the cold, on their way to feeding us. 

In “I am in animal,” artist Marina Roy writes: “Humans recognize themselves only through viewing the animal, not by viewing themselves in a mirror.” In Western thought, the ‘animal’ body delineates the limit of the human—but this line inexorably fails to hold. If only unconsciously, “we still recognize ourselves in the animal.”

Rabbit stew boiling on the stove, we sat around the table salting her small pelt and feet. Someone left with a shovel to bury her soft head and organs in the woods. As we worked, the metal air of her flesh permeating the room, the lines between living/dead and predator/prey dulled.

This part was clear—of course the intimacy of such a process would engender another kind of relationship and, if unaccustomed, provoke a potent bodily response. But there was something about the disfigured milk, its turbid offering. What is it that milk promises?

Milk is versatile and ubiquitous, a darling of capital...It is everything, everywhere and, yet, essentially ungraspable. Milk floods common notions of sense and sensing.

II.

A crack in the pavement turns to moving image as milk is poured from outside the frame. Airy and full, the ghostly foam hesitates at first. Then, all at once, milk spills out and over, filling in the crack as if falling into place: hopeful. The video’s lengthier portion captures what the liquid leaves behind: we observe its complete vanishing. Then, the milk exists only as memory—its absence is made flesh.

Leito is a video series by Brazilian artist Maria Laet that captures milk trickling through various cracks. When the milk is poured, a vertical slash in the frame produces a visceral split: a yearning to heal the wounded skin of the world, severed by the assertion of fracture.

The use of milk as medium provides more than contrast: milk provokes feeling. Milk has long been utilized within photography for its visual potency. Images of milk’s movement supposedly summon feelings of ecstasy, hence the widespread use of splash imagery in beverage advertising. These still frames promise an impossible continuity. Milk’s inevitable collapse is the tragedy. As Bulgarian-French philosopher Julia Kristeva argues in her book Black Sun, froth—that “white mixture of air (pneuma) and liquid”—is the “euphoric counterpart to black bile”(melancholia, in the Hippocratic humours). But, too, in Approaching Abjection, she explores the sense of horror provoked: 

When the eyes see or the lips touch that skin on the surface of milk … I experience a gagging sensation and, still farther down, spasms in the stomach, the belly; and all the organs shrivel up the body, provoke tears and bile, increase heartbeat, cause forehead and hands to perspire.

Milk’s matter provokes a roster of excretions—affiliated, now, as another substance expelled by (and exposing the limits of) the body.

Axiomatically opaque, milk “is itself a kind of skin,” concealing the secret of itself. But milk violates its own skin, interminably. It seeps beyond its own boundaries of form and sign. In Leito, milk, in relation to a fissure in the ground’s skin, is both a border and its permeation: milk does not create the line but illuminates its existence via this act of trespassing.

In “A Preface to Transgression,” French philosopher Michel Foucault writes that “[t]he limit and transgression depend on each other for whatever density of being they possess.” The milk and gap give form to one another, briefly dense. Through repetition, the gesture takes on a permanence. Laet’s becomes a performance of witnessing, which in turn gathers witnesses through its exhibition. Projected onto the wall, both milk and crack appear and recede in an endless loop.

III.

Milk enacts a certain troubling. Mass industrialization transformed milk, abstracting it from its associations with the (female human and nonhuman animal) body while literally removing the human figure from its production, along with all temporal and geographical constraints. As artist-scholars Melanie Jackson and Esther Leslie state in “Journeys of Lactic Abstractions,” “dissociated from messy female bodies, formula milks and processed animal milks extract, separate, and attempt to recombine a problematic fluid into something more streamlined.” To produce the treasured, infinitely transformable product we know today, any memory of the body’s role must be expunged.

However, milk is thick with mixed signals: it is imbued with an odd assemblage of myth, ethics, and norms. It is sold as both the eternal fluid of life and a feat of modern innovation against nature. Milk is simultaneously a symbol of fortitude, purity, and wholeness, as well as rottenness, vulgarity, and risk.

The fluid distinctly marks historical constructions of the human, both as and against the animal. The human, upon graduation from the animality of infancy, begins to drink the milk of cow, sheep, or goat: non-human milk fortifies the human, in content and form. But its degradation is imminent: suddenly, the fluid may invoke disgust or fear for/of the body. The virtue of human breastmilk elapses quickly: in the ‘wrong’ context, it becomes obscene or unsanitary. And yet, the notion of milk as a tether across species was actually overemphasized by the overseer of modern taxonomy. Carl Linnaeus’ creation of the ‘mammalia’ (literally: of the breast) class, links the animalistic nature of humans specifically to milk production. Milk wears down the species line, acting as both convergence and cavity.

Meaning-rich, milk produces an unsettling and convoluted politics. The targets of practices of ‘genetic optimization’—key to the dairy industry at large—slip easily between lactating bodies and their consumers. In Journeys of Lactic Abstraction, Melanie Jackson and Esther Leslie discuss American president Herbert Hoover’s 1923 announcement that  the “growth and virility of the white races” relied on industrial milk. This relationship was reaffirmed by white nationalists celebrating Trump’s 2016 win who, as Jackson and Leslie note, “[toasted] the new political era with cheap, industrial milk, using it to oppose the “soft” leftist-liberal alternative and to celebrate whiteness as a dominant form.” In 2024, raw (unpasteurized) milk—a product typically associated with more liberal-bent farmer’s market-goers—was taken up by M.A.G.A. crowds when promoted by incoming US health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Meanwhile, plant-based milks continue to take over Western markets, imbued with ethical posturing (sold as good for us and good for the planet) and novel identitarian codes (as a TikTok hashtag states, oat milk is gay).

Milk can both mean and be anything. Milk is extracted from every plausible source by whatever means: it is sucked, suckled, pumped, pounded, blended, and drawn from nipples, nuts, seeds, stalks, beans, and stems. It is transformed beyond recognition, packaged and sold in any form—skimmed, condensed, frozen, cultured, dehydrated … Milk is versatile and ubiquitous, a darling of capital. In its utter overproduction of meaning and endless alterability, milk becomes, as Jackson and Leslie argue, “separate from or other to itself.” It is everything, everywhere and, yet, essentially ungraspable. Milk floods common notions of sense and sensing.

Milk floods and becomes rivers. In its movement, it erodes the very idea of the ground we stand on. It opens up questions of being and limit, and leaves behind gaping holes.

IV.

In “Sinks and Spills: The Containment and Entanglements of Matter-Bodies in Frédéric-Back Park,” artist Philippe Vandal contends with entangled relationships across two projects designed by the architecture firm, Lemay: a biogas well system ‘rehabilitating’ a Montréal landfill and the Laval Immigration Holding Centre.

For Vandal, sinks are modes of containment and tools for “monitoring and channeling matter.” Interpreting these discrete projects as sinks reveals Lemay’s design practice as the “racialization of matter, or materialization of race, through displacement, dissimulation, and a politics of filtering, conditioned by a logic of control and dehumanizing rhetoric reminiscent of dominant colonial narratives.” Sinks are management apparatuses—devices that designate, and attempt to maintain, limits. Spills, however, “are the phenomena that define the indeterminacy and porous nature of sinks.” 

The notion of the limit and the very classification of its transgression—the threat of permeation; contamination via another’s entry—are not only arbitrary and in flux, but co-constitutive. The enclosed, whole entity (self, human, state) is defined against that which ‘leaks’ in. The dynamic of sink/spill reveals the requisite politics of (re)organization beneath one’s imagination (and enactment) of itself. 

For example, the colonial entity known as Canada is made possible only through its racialized matrix of extraction, pollution, and filtration. That which props Canada up on its razor’s edge of ecological and economic collapse is essentially, as Vandal notes, a “speculative collaboration of absence and presence.” A recent study found that over 6.8 billion litres of raw milk have vanished from Canadian dairy farms since 2012 in the effort to maintain prices. Sink or spill?

‘El crimen lechero’ (‘the milk crime’) names an incident whereby a dairy company killed 1,920 children with paint-laced milk in Bogotá in 1979. Poisoned milk entered markets and, subsequently, children’s bodies, in an effort to cut costs; a collaboration between corporate predation, state neglect, and milk’s certain turbidity. In response, Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña performed an act of protest for 12 viewers: “I announced the spilling of a glass of milk in front of the residence of the liberator Simón Bolivar. People gathered, I spilled the glass.” Like the close-up images of a crime scene, Óscar Monsalve’s photos of the event reveal only Vicuña’s hand pulling on a length of red yarn tied around a glass of milky fluid and its phantasmic shape formed on the pavement.

The performance’s documentation is entitled, simply, Vaso de Leche, Bogotá (Glass of Milk, Bogota, 1979). Based on the whitish stains on Vicuña’s fingers, it is evident that this glass contains not milk but some combination of water and white paint. It is, then, a performance of milk, in direct reproduction of the milk crime––but the violence of Vicuña’s spill is inflicted upon the paved ground, bringing light to whatever it attempts to cover over, all of its porous failings. The milk-paint’s luminous reminder, its ghostly figure, resurfaces at each glimpse of these images. Their witnessing lives as another spill: to see, to gather around what has been hidden.

Milk is sold as purity made manifest, yet it embodies both poison and poison’s witness. It speaks of death and is, itself, death-making. We are contaminated through this sight: milk infiltrates crack, poisons, and trickles on and on. Belief in the ground, or skin, as limit—any fiction of wholeness—is weathered by the act’s repetition. 

In Leito, milk’s anomalous form renders its eventual absence visible/visceral. As the world/viewer is contaminated by its disconcerting light, milk’s trace fades to black. We’re left for two long minutes with our grief. 

‘Leito’ translates to ‘bed’ but, whereas ‘cama’ is bed’s more common term, ‘leito’ holds the sense of the hospital bed or the bed in which a person dies. As well, in reference to the bed of a river, ‘leito’ can mean ‘flow’ as in ‘leito do rio:’ ‘river flow.’ Close to ‘leite’ or ‘milk’, the title Leito evokes a river of milk as a current moving towards death; the body’s resting place. 

V.

It might be wise to be suspicious of milk. Pure white milk is fabricated—as Jackson and Leslie point out, “cow’s milk, for its part, exists in a range between blue and yellowy orange.” Milk’s whiteness is itself fantasy, devised through homogenization. Detailing milk’s symbolism in Hitchcock films, Matthew Beaumont claims that, “in order to maintain its reputation for purity … milk must constantly repress its inner condition of otherness.”³ Any matter imbued with the notion of purity is suspect.

Although it is mostly water, the fat and protein molecules in milk reflect light at a wavelength that makes the liquid appear white. In his book, Milk and Melancholy, Kenneth Hayes writes that this assemblage of “fat, protein, corpuscles, lactose, chyle, and plasma … lacks darkness but lacks also the morally pure transparency of crystal.” In The Opacity of Dreams, on the work of Édouard Glissant, writer, curator and image theorist Gwynne Fulton writes: “opacity is not the reverse of transparency. It is not obscurity. Rather, it signals resistance to erasure.” As milk’s bright opacity resists its own erasure, revealing the secret of itself as other, all fictions of purity—of impermeable skins and other borders—begin to unravel.

Thus, milk’s promise is its threat. Milk floods and becomes rivers. In its movement, it erodes the very idea of the ground we stand on. It opens up questions of being and limit, and leaves behind gaping holes. Milk vanishes, but its ghostly residue is embedded: its trace endures in the earth’s cracks and on the tip of the tongue.