Ghost to Ourselves

Participatory performance
as part of UnAuthorised Medium: Intense Visitations, FramerFramed, Amsterdam, Netherlands
A cartography of stories 
Ghost to Ourselves is a durational participatory performance as a way of haunting the self. Situated as an intervention at Finnisage Weekend of UnAuthorised Medium: Intense Visitations, visitors can come by during the indicated time slots to watch or participate in the intimate performance. In utilising the body as a living archive and the lived experience as embedded knowledge, the experimental performance investigates the conditions in which our body carry traces of our past selves that our present selves may not yet recognise, from which we may better understand our own subjectivity.
The performative ritual begins with an exercise to reflect on our body as a living archive. As an intervention to the exhibition space, you are invited to remove your shoes and walk around the gallery barefoot. 
Upon returning, a postcard will be given to you and your participating partner, where it contains a map to trace your walking experience through mark marking - exploring how visibility through lines, textures, patterns can be brought into how our bodies register our feelings and senses, as well as relative space, time and distance. The finished drawing embodies and archives a lived experience, where ‘gaps’ within our own personal archives also gradually reveal themselves, through the selectiveness of memory is embedded within the drawing. You and your partner will then swap and narrate each other’s walk, unpicking personal socio-cultural inquiry, subjectivity insights and objectivity of possible truths.
To perform what otherwise wouldn’t be normalised in a gallery setting, is an invitation to connect more intimately with the exhibition, with a heightened consciousness of the body, as a knowledge interface existing in physical space. 
​In thinking about subject and subjectivity with the self as an embodied minded being, the work in question itself is archival. Informal archive is drawn and produced at the same time as stories of the self and others are being constructed, enmeshed within the social and political narratives that surround personal experience. ‘Fictioning’ - performing the archive - becomes a way to access our adaptive unconscious and engage with the archive, within the process of teasing out points of intersections, post-rationalising past events in the present, and reflecting upon what is lost amidst the acts of translation. ‘Fictioning’ also becomes a way to reflect on the exhibition and the affective register of its experience that could relate the political back to the personal. The duty to remember and desire to document have opened up stories ranging from personal grief, forgotten trauma, longing for home, to contemporary questions and social urgencies facing the production and organisation of histories - all of which recognises that you are always already part of an active archive.
The final invitation is to join and contribute to the growing living archive, by gifting and haunting the self.

​You will address the postcard to yourself, as a souvenir that fossilises the present, where the artist will post in the future. As the collective archive that is now posted to all across the world, the performance now lives on whenever the act of retrieving is performed, to unlearn, understand and retell stories of the past - one seeming historical yet very much is about the present.