Tangor ergo sum begins with a displacement of one of philosophy's most familiar propositions. In Cogito ergo sum — "I think, therefore I am" — Descartes establishes existence through the certainty of thought. Kosmatopoulos replaces cogito with tangor, the passive Latin form of touch: I am touched. Existence no longer appears as the conclusion of an autonomous mind reflecting upon itself, but as something experienced through a body exposed to what lies outside it.
The shift from thinking to being touched is also a shift from activity to receptivity. The sentence does not declare "I touch"; it begins with something that happens to me. Another body, surface or presence reaches mine. The self is therefore not presented as closed and self-sufficient, but as vulnerable to contact and constituted through its relation to a world it cannot entirely control.
This primacy of embodied existence recalls Nietzsche's rejection of a self detached from the body. Thought does not precede life from a position outside it: it emerges from a living organism, with its sensations, drives, limits and encounters. Tangor ergo sum does not oppose thought to the body so much as return thought to the physical condition that makes it possible.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty's notion of the touching-touched body gives the proposition another dimension. When one hand touches another, the touching hand can simultaneously feel itself being touched. It moves between subject and object, action and reception, without settling permanently into either position.
The existence of the Other appears through this same reciprocity. Contact encounters a surface that responds and resists. The Other is not confirmed as a thought or an image, but as a physical presence that remains exterior to the self. Yet the gesture that makes the Other perceptible also returns the self to its own body: I feel myself at the point where something outside me reaches my skin.
Rendered in neon, the phrase occupies an unstable position between statement and sensation. Neon is visible but its light has no surface that can be grasped. It spreads across the wall and enters the viewer's space, making the words physically present without giving them a body that can be held.
Within Caressing Walls, Tangor ergo sum acts as a proposition from which the other works unfold. The skin becomes the place where the self is separated from the world and opened to it at the same time. Touch does not erase this boundary. It makes both sides of it perceptible.
I am touched. I encounter something that is not me. I feel myself become body. Therefore, I am.
