Each of these artifacts marks a path towards home. Home as the body, home as a heartbeat, home somewhere between subject/object, human/non-human, animal/machine.
︎︎︎ M.Arch Thesis Project
The Artifacts of No-Place was a project undertaken as part of the M.Arch thesis. The project lasted two years and revolved around producing a series of artifacts. The artifacts were consistently white, positioned on the head, and modulated light to the rhythm of the wearer’s heartbeat. These artifacts were imagined as a form of praxis, exploring ideas to do with posthumanism — a field which dismantles the idea that humans are exceptional, breathing new life into what it means to exist and be in relation with human and non-human kin. 2/8 prototypes are featured here.
Prototype 4.0 pokes at the themes of liberation, concealment, and spectacle through improvised performance. Finding anonymity in obliterating the face with a clean white helmet, the performer expands into the city to co-opt it into her dance. The structural confines of the surround and its hard edges are redefined briefly into a space of transformation for her body. A body which is continuously defined by the gaze of others and the trespasses of unwanted hands in the anonymous crowds.
Prototype 8.0 is a performance piece that uses modulated light and shadow to make visible the condition of embodied liminality felt in racialized diasporic existence. Playing with the translucency of plastic sheets, the perceivable boundaries of the body within the enclosure are blurred, remixed, and reinhabited. The enclosure served as a mask for the body; for a masked body.
Year: 2020
Medium: Installation, Sculpture, Performance, Short Film
Filming locations: Shibuya Crossing, Tokyo, Japan; Dongdaemun Design Plaza, Seoul, South Korea; BRIDGE Centre for Architecture + Design, Cambridge, Canada.
The artifacts, images, and work produced during this project have been exhibited as part of Presently, an exhibit at the Art Gallery of Peterborough [2020]; Prototypica_ an exhibit at the Design at Riverside Gallery [2022]; and RA:X Puncta an exhibit presented during the Reel Asian International Film Festival [2022].