[i carry
(2017)Performance-Installation;
Performer, string curtain, PVC sheet, 2-channel reactive projection, 2-channel reactive sound, laptop, Processing code, table, bed and blanket, food contributions, dimensions variable.
"I came to understand place as verb rather than noun, which exists in our doings: walking, talking, living." - Simryn Gill
[i carry is a performance-installation that reacts to the movements of lifts in an urban compound over a 24-hour cycle. In Singapore, given the verticality of our buildings, lifts are relied upon everyday. Therefore, the work identifies lift movements as a metaphor for daily activity, gesturing towards the interplays between routine and its dependencies.
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Spaces and infrastructures breathe as her occupants do, and the work’s durational element traces the shifting psyche of physical structures. In a web of interconnectedness, that which are unobserved or forgotten still bear weight – on other people, in other places, in other times. [i carry, then, is an exercise to consider the ordinary actors, the people and processes which routine (through repetition, mechanisation, and constancy) has rendered invisible, that keep us afloat.
The work's title bears a direct reference to e.e. cumming’s poem [i carry your heart with me(i carry it in]. It is an account of several things: care and companionship; the stubborn dependencies we impose on each other; some conceit embedded in our presumptions of the very notion of caring; the idiosyncrasies of being around, and being with. Surely, there are baggages and obligations that we carry for – and of – each other, all part of our routines, enacted cyclically.
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In sum, by presenting lifts as literal and metaphorical carriages, I wanted to ask: who or what carries us, and who or what do we carry in return?
Photo credits:
Teo Xiao Ting
Video credits:
Phang Zixin
Special thanks:
Janel Ang
Exhibited in:
Yale-NUS College Capstone Showcase, Singapore
Celeste Prize 2017, Oxo Tower, London
