departures was an attempt to understand the interconnectedness of death and life, and an effort to make the global personal.
This was a very quiet, dark and still piece. In each space, I worked without lights in the room, but wore small lights on my wrists. Suspended throughout the room were glass globes and other objects.
I began at the door, giving gave each person a handful of sand, telling them the number of grains in their hand and its relationship to the population of their city. 500 handfuls would equal the population of the world. 8900 handfuls would equal all the people who ever lived on the planet. 5 handfuls would equal the number who die each year in the world.
I continued by speaking quietly about the deaths that we never hear about, the deaths that we in the US don’t want to talk about: in Iraq, our destruction of the planet, our own future deaths.
Then I invited the audience to move around the room with me, gathering at each suspended object where I turned on a small light over it, so that it glowed.
We began at suspended a rock with moss growing on it – a miniature world with precarious life. Next was a glass globe which I filled with water, adding salt and more salt – our bodies, the oceans. We moved to a globe full of rotting meat – the smell of death that we always try to cover up or avoid. The next was a globe of black earth – the smell of the land, our source of life and also what the meat/our bodies will become. The next an empty globe – full of air, our breaths, the molecules of each other that we had shared in our time together in the room. And finally a sphere of ice, melting – as we all dissolve.
And then I left.
The globes looked very beautiful glowing in the darkness, floating as if they were planets in space.
The stench of the rotting meat permeated the room. It is a smell that disturbs the oldest part of our brains.
Subsequent performances of this work took place at the Corporeal Heat International Festival of Performance, Boston, MA; Gallery Soto, Boston, MA; Waterloo Center for the Arts, Waterloo, Iowa, and CSPS/Legion Arts, Cedar Rapids, Iowa; FIX04 Biennial of Performance Art, Belfast, N. Ireland; and The Future of Imagination II International Performance Art Event, Singapore.
