Title: Speaking from the gaps and overlaps
Medium: Performance (video documentation)
Size: Variable
Duration: approximately 10 minutes
Year: 2017
Description
This performance is exploring the Dalastuga, the Swedish red painted croft, as a diasporic access point to my former culture. During the performance stand in by the overhead projector, in a dark room facing the audience. I take one image after another out of a pile and place them on the projector glass. The images pictures Swedish red painted croft environments, images that symbolise home. I slowly layer them on the projector glass. I see the images superimpose and shift, I see a new composition develop. My hands touch the images; they adjust and shift the gaps and overlaps. They audience see my touch as it is projected behind me. They see the ambiguous blur from images in motion and the shadows from my hands. The projected image slowly becomes more complicated, red turns maroon and windows change into pattern. During the performance I speak of red houses, the once I remember and the once I imagine. The performance ends when the image is fully obscured, it ends with black.
Reflection
This performance is an exploration into the interaction between vision and touch in my diasporic experience. It investigates the contradiction of belonging with more than one culture, a sense of being here but simultaneously longing for there. It weaves together vision and touch to examine how elsewhere can be reconstructed here, how my former home in Sweden is reimagined from my position in a new culture. My hands layer the images of Swedish red painted crofts, they move from clarity to obscurity, from singular entities to a form of multiplicity and from photographic stillness to the movement of performance. As I speak the experience of accessing home through a combination of vision and touch forms the narrative. I speak from the gaps and overlaps and my voice tell stories that reiterate, mutate and falter.