WE ARE HERE. HOLDING HUMANITY. OF THE EACH OF US.
ISRAEL + PALESTINE.
The horrors of October 7.
The ongoing devastation in Gaza.
1BDY was born in a moment when suffering is real and sacred, and no grief should ever be minimized. It is not about simplistic peace, but about moving in a generative direction for humanity - toward a world that works for the whole body.
ARTIST STATEMENT
1BDY - ONE BODY OR NOBODY
Alice Frank
1BDY is an artwork born from a truth that is both devastating and ecstatic: there is no other.
We can divide the human body into territories, draw borders across its skin, assign names and flags to different regions, but wherever the body is shot, the entire body goes down. The organism does not experience harm as separate. Injury is never local. Suffering is systemic.
War appears, on the surface, as though we are striking someone else. But the deeper truth is that violence travels through the shared body of humanity. When one child is killed, innocence is killed everywhere. When grief is planted in one family, it grows outward, and it comes back around.
Hate is what happens when the wounding of a people goes unrecognized. Violence erupts from unattended grief. Pain, left unseen, becomes combustible. And then that pain is legislated - seized, shaped, and weaponized by those who take power through division. The wound is exploited, and more bodies fall.
This work places opposing identities on a single human form not as a statement of politics, but as a statement of reality. The body becomes the meeting place. The canvas is not a map of separation, but a refusal of separation.
1BDY also holds the difficult truth of healing: that cancers of hate must be met, undone, and removed at the level of consciousness. But the removal of hate cannot be accomplished through the killing of innocents, because the killing of innocents is the killing of oneself. It is the destruction of our own humanity under the illusion of defense.
One Body or Nobody is not a metaphor. It is an ethical law of nature.
The question is not whose side we are on. I’m not on a side; I’m on the inside. It’s only about the inside, because on the inside, we are one.
There is no other.
The Immune System of Humanity
If humanity is one body, then each of us is a cell within it.
In every body, there are cells that forget the whole. They become consumed by fear, by survival, by separation. They begin to act as though the rest of the organism is an enemy.
This is how cancer functions: not as pure evil, but as a cell that has lost its memory of belonging.
And yet the deepest medicine is not hatred of the cancer. The deepest medicine is strengthening the health of the whole.
Some harm must be stopped. Some violence must be prevented. But the brunt of restoration does not come from destroying bodies. It comes from reinforcing what is weak everywhere.
It comes from nourishing the places of vulnerability. From listening where pain has gone unheard. From repairing the conditions in which hatred metastasizes.
The overwhelming majority of human beings are not extremists. They are ordinary cells longing to feel safe, seen, and held within the whole.
The question of our time is simple:
Will we become cancer cells of division, or white blood cells of repair?
One Body or Nobody.
N O W V O W
We will not allow governments and billionaires to exploit our profound pain by leading us further into the quagmire of violence against more and more innocents.
We see our wounding and tend to it - and to one another’s - and begin a conversation that leads to a future of coexistence.
We stop now employing the strategies of our past oppressors, and step into the promise of who we have always been:
A people who serve humanity, and the Unity therein - what we call Allah, Buddha-nature, Tao, the Christ, Elohim, Hashem.
A World That Works for Everyone
A body cannot survive by denying a limb its right to exist.
If our map of the Earth leaves any people wandering, displaced, or unwanted, there will be war. Not because people are inherently violent, but because homelessness at the level of a people becomes an existential wound.
When a collective has no place to stand, no home in the human story, desperation and terror grow in the vacuum.
If one believes that Israelis do not deserve to exist, that they should simply disappear or “go elsewhere,” without care for where or how, the body remains in rupture. There will be no peace because there will be a people left wandering.
And if one believes that Palestinians do not deserve to exist, that they should be erased or expelled, there will be no peace because there will be a people left with nothing to lose.
A world that works requires a home for everyone.
This is not a utopian statement. It is the minimum condition for any shared future.
The only reality that does not produce endless war is one in which both peoples are held inside the human circle. Two lives. Two histories. Two legitimate longings for safety and belonging.
One land. Two homes.
Anything less is amputation.
Anything less leaves part of the body outside the body, and the body will not stop screaming until it is made whole.
The Spark and Its Place (Tikkun, Tawhid)
In Kabbalah, this work is called Tikkun Olam (תיקון עולם) - the restoration of the world.
Not as a slogan, but as a cosmic truth: that every spark of creation must be returned to its place. Nothing is superfluous. Nothing is outside the circle of belonging. Repair means that each fragment of life is seen, known, and given home within the Whole.
In this view, every human being is a cell in the single body of the Divine; each one carrying an irreplaceable spark. When any spark is denied its place, the world remains in rupture.
In Islam, there is a parallel knowing: Tawhid (توحيد), the oneness of Reality; the truth that nothing exists outside the One. And within that oneness, Islah (إصلاح); the work of restoration, of setting right what has been torn.
Both traditions insist, in different languages, on the same essential law:
The world cannot be whole while any people are made homeless in the human story.
The body cannot be whole while any part is cast out.
Tikkun (תיקון) is giving every spark its place.
Tawhid (توحيد) is remembering that the place was always within the One.
This is the spiritual ground beneath 1BDY:
A world that works for everyone, where every life is seen, known, and held, and no one is left outside the map of belonging.
The Power of Returning to One
The destructive force of division is never just a metaphor. Consider the nuclear bomb: its terrible power comes from the splitting of what was once a single, unified whole. When something originally one is torn apart, the division itself releases destruction. Yet this also means that returning to unity holds immense transformative power.
In the Abrahamic lineage, Ishmael and Isaac - Islam and Israel - were once one family, one body of Abraham. Their division created a wound that echoed through history. And because they were once one, the act of coming back together again carries that same energy in reverse: the power to reconcile and restore.
This is the essence of 1BDY. We remember that what was once unified still holds the potential for reunion. We are not on opposite sides; we are finding our way back inside the one body we’ve always shared. And in that reunion, we release not destruction, but restoration and a return to wholeness.
The Prayer of 1BDY (Call and Response)
There is an ancient prayer that begins:
Hear, O Israel:
Consciousness is Everything,
and Everything is One.
But 1BDY is asking for its inversion as well.
A call and response between the One and the All:
Hear, O Humanity:
All is One.
And then:
Hear, O Infinite:
Humanity is One.
This is the prayer beneath the politics.
This is the remembrance beneath the war.
Not that difference disappears, but that no life is outside the Body.
Origin
1BDY was photographed in 2014. Long before the current escalation, this work emerged as an intuitive recognition: that the illusion of “the other” would continue to endanger us until the human body is seen as one. The images remain, years later, as an eternal space still being held.
Words Upon Parchment (Field-Notes)
The cataclysm of the Middle East is an evolutionary
c a t a l y s t ,
eking out bias in the dark of every peace-maker, bringing us more deeply into
O N E N E S S E M B O D I E D
AF
The root of all people is made of two desires:
The desire to give of themselves, and to be known, seen, and heard.
When there is an obstacle in the natural flow of this happening, war is
c r e a t e d .
AF
"It may happen that your hand makes a mistake and hits you. But would you then take a stick and punish your hand because it lacked understanding, and so increase your pain?
It is the same if your neighbor, who is of one soul with you, wrongs you because he does not understand. If you punish him, you only hurt yourself."
Rabbi Shmelke of Nikolsburg
"Our futures are inextricably bound."
Martin Luther King Jr.
L O V E Y O U R N E I G H B O R
A S S O M E T H I N G Y O U , Y O U R S E L F , A R E .
Even those of us who long for peace, if we find ourselves anti-Israel or anti-Palestine, we are unconsciously contributing to war.
AF
"If we divide into two camps - even into violent and the nonviolent - and stand in one camp while attacking the other, the world will never have peace."
Ayya Khema
See the oppressed in the oppressor.
The oppressed become the oppressors, until we witness the cycle with compassion and understanding.
AF
I S R A E L :
"We are commanded to love our neighbor as ourself.
How can I do this if my neighbor has wronged me?"
The rabbi answered:
"You must understand these words correctly.
Love your neighbor like something which you yourself are.
For all souls are one."
I S L A M :
"That which you want for yourself, seek for mankind."
Conversations with Muhammad
H A T E I S T A U G H T . L O V E I S K N O W N .
( thank you. )