Title: The Erasure of Mind and Memory
Medium: Performance Art
Material: Body of the artist, black costume with veil, peripheral rocks standing,white fabric, jute bags, blocks cut out of demolished rock handpicked from construction sites, sound, hammer
This environmentalist-feminist performance artwork is executed in four overlapping phases with many layers.
Each phase is an expression of
- Helplessness, nostalgia, the lament over the needless abandonment of ancient wisdom, of the irreversible loss of a legacy of fragile ecosystems.
The artist is seen in a black veiled costume struggling to drag a heavy jute bag up the rocky hills to place it next to a group of several other jute bags.On her shoulder is a big bundle of white fabric. The chosen spot is between two large sets of rocks. With great effort she overturns the bags to empty them one by one. Neatly cut blocks of demolished rock of different sizes picked from construction sites fall out.An important layer throughout the performance is the incessant sound of a hammer hitting a rock. - In the next phase the artist goes about trying to wrap the white bundle of cloth around one of the huge rocks, the wind blowing a resistance to her efforts, the noise of the hammer hitting stone – a loud contrast to the background. There is a layer of possibllities depicted here…of human intervention, of remorse and realisation, as she hugs and feels the rock, an act of trying to take care…
- The third phase suggests a deep connection of being with the rock, a sense of oneness, a carefree abandon and comfort as she quickly scales and climbs the other huge rock complex, feels it with her hands, and feet and body, learns to let go of her fear as she hugs the rock, reaches the very top of the rock, stands tall, and does the vrikshasan and veerabhadrasan. This phase is about the human and the rock – a desire to overcome hurdles and power on, – a reminder to stay close to nature, of renewed inner strength and inspiration, that she derives from nature, in this case the rock – the relationship of human survival being coexistent with the other ecosystems that the rock sustains, and which is now being endangered by human greed and ignorance in many ways.
- The concluding phase is when she comes down from the rock, goes to the heap of rocks she has collected and dragged up the hill. She sits down and tries to reconstruct a rock out of the broken pieces. They keep falling down as she tries again and again and fails every time. After a while, she gives up in grief and frustration, and walks away, sad and helpless to become one with the crowd.