(No Place) Like Home, tomorrow I grow older
Performed at Pushkin House, as part of Dust and Shapes (group exhibition) | April 2024
Link to the event page here.
Dust and Shapes exhibition and event description:
“Join us for a tactile lunch workshop reinterpreting ingredients from different places, followed by a bespoke exhibition. We aim to share an experience of modern migration, connect through the culinary arts, and create a sense of belonging.
Dust and Shapes is a sensory awakening experience aiming to reflect how origin and journey affect our choices, how one's unique encounters shape the present and future, and how our roots entangle and intertwine with foreign elements, forming new pathways.
We will gather around recipes from our memories, combining elements from our journey so far and forming new connections with our surroundings and other individuals within the space, regardless of the differences found in identity.
Throughout the day, there will be works displaying elements of migration, from cultural identity to a land of the displaced and a resurgence of the same identity through a complex combination of acceptance and the inevitable convergence of cultures.
Migration is a process one is inflicted to go through due to the culmination of choices, both unseen and planned, and an individual finds oneself navigating this journey while struggling to procure sustenance.
This event highlights how one finds themselves integrating their own cultural practices and traditional recipes with where they are now. The feeling of displacement, which cannot be removed completely, is evolving into something personal to each individual and their journeys.”
When I was invited to participate in this show that embodied the themes of migration, belonging, and culinary arts, I had to consider my body of works in a new way. At this time I had felt a guilt and discomfort in the distance I felt from painting, created from the demand of full-time work. Though, thinking around the themes of moving and finding belonging, I thought immediately about my old painting (No Place) Like Home. I felt ‘bad’ for pulling a painting from the archives to show, for some reason, like I am directly looking at my distinct lack of making that year in the eye. I thought about the themes of food and digestion. I thought about my encounter with my old painting again, and the act of re-digesting it and what it would mean. The result is a text response, which I performed next to my painting. Incidentally, the day after the exhibition was my birthday, so the existential theme of time passing also finds its way in the piece as well. I was also in an uncertain place of not knowing my future and how much time I had left in London, so really it was a personal confession amidst also witnessing global violence documented in the media at the time. At the event, I read the writing from a piece of tracing paper. Below is the short description accompanying the piece:
A re-digestion of a painting made five years ago, (No Place) Like Home, tomorrow I grow older is an anxious dialogue around a past piece of work about feeling extreme displacement in constant migration resulting in an ambiguously melancholic stasis, collaged from a still in the film Drowning Love (2016) and photographs taken of the landscape through a moving plane. This confrontation plays with the absurdly desperate proposal of how past evidence devouring oneself and vice versa, might successfully arrive in the sense of belonging - to merge as one, despite having no roots tied to land. It is a last attempt to find oneself before the certain departure of tomorrow.
(No Place) Like Home, tomorrow I grow older
[to be read, in the mind, with the impermeable balance of urgency and hush]
I make this entry in front of you all today as a last attempt to place myself; dis-place myself; for tomorrow I must depart, and I don’t know when tomorrow is, or where I’m going, or where I will land; Surely I must comprehend, with every fibre and pine of my being, distinctly where I am before I know, utterly and fanatically, where I must, go? And at which point I must, head?
I inhale, humid, putrid, moisture-decay for droplets to soak my oesophagus; I give in to [survival instincts], to take in some sweet sustenance, so I don’t get devoured, and I don’t devour myself. I gnaw, distress, eat away, chomp - certainly irritate the painting, the wood, this pathetic, decomposing has-been; yet it still stands, huffing, and puffing, in static monument. How can something floating in a river stay so still? How can something, at such mercy of one’s own hands suspend, comprehend, as galaxy? As bird-eye?
As I take in the dubious affair of pigment, I resurface this vital piece of evidence of what was once recklessly held together; in my cheeks they start to bubble, and burst, and corrode, because I am still in fact brewing in the same place they were conceived. This has-been a deceptive loop and I had forgotten how we play this game; we chew, we swallow, we regurgitate, and we do it all again; until neither of us hold a semblance of belonging to any land. We exist in rubble and we resurface to shout at the sky for someone to find us, believe us, dislocate us. We’d cut off our own limb and eat it if we could. Anything to be, anything to long.
This feather weight is an astucious cotton ball; nothing inflamed like a heartbreak, but a sinister yearning of the back rooms, in between the walls. We’ve never had a home, but I heard there’s nothing like it.
Not being tied down like a birthday balloon paralyses you from the ground up. Where does a birthday balloon find its freedom, anyway?
Something, some piece on this earth will be it, and it must be the place I will be rooted in, grounded in, buried in. Then I might finally become evidence of something, some piece that once existed.
So I ask you to join hands with me, so we don’t float away. We are suspended as one, but I cannot tell if I am moving, moved, stirring, or still, in my words.