Moth-er

//Seeing a flower is seeing a universe, a moment is eternal

 

Virtual Reality (Real-time) Performance

1.59 Gallery, 22 Nov 2007 (Thursday) 7:00pm -11:00pm

 

 

Like the solitary life of a moth in a circle

 

The person who grows moths in order to collect their silk is called a moth-er. They limit the moths to laying eggs in circles. The moths exhaust their lives by laying eggs. Then, they leave the circle, and their life is over. Only the pattern of their eggs remain as traces of their existence and their disappearance all at the same time. The self-completing process of life is solitude.

 

I see this solitude in my mother’s and my own.

 

My mother is a minimalist. She does almost everything by herself, leads a simple life but is prepared. She has even bought her own small gravestone for her ashes already. That gravestone is a unit arranged like ‘a tiny flat in a building’ in a flat itself. Her stone is near my deceased aunt’s stone. She said: ´Then you will know where to visit me when I am not here.´ I was shocked.

 

For me, desire is trouble, unrest and catastrophe. It is dynamic but risky in life. But by keeping myself in solitude, I can avoid life’s catastrophes. Gradually, life is completed. The destiny of a calm death is to disappear

 

 

Micro representation of life in 2 ½ hours in a fish pond

 

‘Moth-er’, the performance was a micro representation of a life of solitude in 2 ½ hours. Audiences could gaze out at a fishpond view of real-time projection on the floor of a winter garden created by flour outside 1.59 gallery. They could have a ‘one to one’ intimate distance with the Moth-er to witness her exhausting her solitary life by the side of the gallery door.

 

‘Seeing a flower is seeing a universe, a moment is eternal’ is an idiom from Chinese literature. The usage of ‘Virtual Reality’ as medium in ‘Moth-er’ brings the audience to view life as a process of change under a microscope. In the river of time, the visitors can step into the river at different times but it would never be the same.

 

The form of performance inside the gallery:-

 

- I created a warm climate in the 1.59 Gallery.

- I became a Moth-er.

- I was wearing two pairs of panties for the top and bottom of my body.

- I filled the panties with dough. The dough deformed my body.

- I cut the panties with scissors and the dough leaked out from my body.

- I made dough balls out of it and I arranged them in a circle from the outskirts toward the center. It was like the moths laying eggs.

- At last, I exhausted the dough on my body. The panties were full of wounds.

- I left the circle and the negative shape of my existence remains.

- I walked out and left the space.

 

 

Written by Vik, March 2008