The where is where I don’t want to be

Collaborative, durational installation performance

As part of Melaka Arts & Performance festival, 2024

Everyday I was making an act of appearance and disappearance, and so were the elements I was adding, which kept transforming as the days went by. Few people would see me making, others only the trace I was leaving behind. This related to the idea of imagination in relation to the mirror, where the image appears and disappears. 

The image appears in an in between space which is a no space, where time does not exist. What’s in the mirror as in our imagination and in our states of spirituality & creation is in suspense. What’s in suspense floats, is not here or there. 

The perfect tension, a balance of forces, holds the floating piece. It holds the thought, the desire, the feeling, the idea, the image. The body and the mind, “the place”, hold the “no-place”, the in between. 

I kept noticing how structures were being taken over by plants, the fragility of surfaces cracking, held tightly by the roots of the plants sustaining them. The thread holding what is about to collapse. The plants taking the outside, inside. An allusion to embodying something or someone else in us. To recognise we are everything else. To contain as opposed to being contained. 

There was an invitation to get closer, to notice and to contemplate, which changes the focus of plain observation. A female energy grew bigger, moving all emotions and emanated from the central element, the source of creation. 

I enjoyed seeing the work become part of something bigger, a collaborative experience with my dear friends and artists who were adding other elements to the space where we danced for the last time. Humbled by being part of it all.